Friday, July 31, 2009
Noah Logue Asks Dem Officials: Will Handicapped People Like Me Get Medical Services Under Obamacare?
This is powerful. Noah Logue is a deaf student at a local special needs college in St. Louis. Noah currently is able to afford the equipment necessary for him to communicate and lead an independent life. Under Obamacare Noah may not qualify since he is special needs citizen. Noah asked Dem operatives if he is going to be punished under Obamacare.
Headlines Friday 31st July 2009
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Kyle, Jackie O stunt 'child abuse'
RADIO rape stunt on teen girl should be treated as child abuse, say prominent Australians.
Australian tourism 'on life support'
TOURISM'S worst year in decades won't go away with the crisis expected to hit new lows. - Thank you Rudd. -ed.
Terrified family flees pervert grandad
A GRANDFATHER who repeatedly raped his 8-year-old granddaughter remains free, leaving his victim sick with fear.
'Dying patient' admits cancer con
A WOMAN has admitted that she faked having terminal cancer to con money from members of her sympathetic community.
Mum of 13 vows to keep number 14
A MUM banned from raising her kids says she'll keep having them until authorities let her keep one.
79-year-old hoon to get car impounded
MAN caught doing 160km/h told cops "it was lucky you didn't get me before, I was going faster".
Good Samaritans sacked over sandwich
TWO council workers were sacked after they received free food for helping the elderly.
Miss Universe Australia Rachael Finch flees monster croc
MISS Universe Australia Rachael Finch met some crocodiles during her Northern Territory visit yesterday and had to run for her life when a 5m croc named Eric lunged at her.
Men, women see differently - study
MEN are better at seeing things in the distance due to their hunter-gatherer past chasing animals, while women are better focusing on things at close range, a British study said.
=== Comments ===
Aussie left to rot away in a foreign hell hole
Piers Akerman
EVER since Australia elected its first diplomat prime minister, the nation’s foreign relations have been in a downward spiral.
Those trapped between Kevin Rudd’s UN ambitions and his attempts to curry favour with tin-pot Third World dictatorships are paying a cruel penalty.
One such is Perth’s Peter Gray, held in Mauritius for four years without charge on trumped-up heroin accusations.
Foreign Affairs Minister Stephen Smith has made it clear that Gray is on his own. So much so, that Smith’s department cancelled Gray’s passport - on information provided by Mauritius police
In correspondence between Smith and Gray’s relatives, Smith flatly noted: “There is no requirement under section 13 of the Passport Act for a person to be actually charged prior to the cancellation of a passport.” - That sound you hear from the busy offices of Australian Government under the ALP is Smith washing his hands of Australia's obligations. At least Gray hails from WA, and they have a Liberal government. Maybe he can get some support from them. I'm reminded of how Bob Carr in NSW promised in 2004 that NSW would not go to war in Iraq .. and they didn't. Until then, I hadn't been aware that states could cover for the inability of the ALP to be sensible in any form of government. So powerful are these lesser Government bodies under the ALP I half expect the Fairfield Mayor knock back a sister city arrangement with the Great Consumer Al Gore. - ed.
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SAD TRAD
Tim Blair
An interesting result:
Islamic identity Keysar Trad’s defamation case against a Sydney radio station has collapsed, with a Supreme Court justice saying Trad did in fact make remarks that were “offensive’’, “racist’’ and “condone violence’’.
Friday’s judgment comes in opposition to a jury’s decision in 2007 which found Mr Trad was defamed by broadcaster Jason Morrison, who implied that he was a disgraceful, dangerous individual who incited people to commit violent acts.
Trad’s lawyers have indicated he will appeal the decision.
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FREE MONEY STOPPED
Tim Blair
It was fun for the six days it lasted:
Congressional officials say the government plans to suspend the popular “cash for clunkers” program amid concerns it could quickly use up the $1 billion in rebates for new car purchases.
The Transportation Department called congressional offices late Thursday to alert them to the decision to halt the program, which offered owners of old cars and trucks $3,500 or $4,500 toward a new, more fuel-efficient vehicle.
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STANCE TAKEN
Tim Blair
Yes, I am opposed to gay divorce.
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Labor’s pay to play
Andrew Bolt
What else will Labor sell them?
AT 8am today, the Labor Party will sweep aside a velvet rope at the Sydney Convention Centre and beckon in an exclusive coterie of ticket holders.
Together, these 100 business leaders paying $7500 each will pour almost $1 million into ALP coffers in exchange for some face time with government ministers on the sidelines of the party’s national conference.
The ALP’s cash-for-access program could provide a real-time case study for the Crime and Misconduct Commission as it looks into this pay-per-view style of political fundraising.
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Just blame warming instead
Andrew Bolt
Yet another blame-global-warming stunt by people with their hands out:
THREE of Australia’s biggest non-government organisations are hosting competing visits by Pacific Islanders to urge Kevin Rudd to do more to combat climate change - and especially rising sea levels… Oxfam and Greenpeace are hosting a visit about the impact of climate change from Pelenise Alofa Pilitati, managing director of a Kiribati NGO; Reverend Tafue Lusama, chairman of the Tuvalu Climate Action Network; and Marstella Jack, former attorney-general of the Federated States of Micronesia.
Sadly for them, reporter Rowan Callick wasn’t born yesterday:
Bill Mitchell, who manages the South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project that provides the only observed data for the region, said its records only extended to almost 20 years.
“It is not clear yet what contribution long-term climate change is making to sea levels, but we are getting there,” he said....
The Oxfam report does not, however, cite the South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project, which is run by Australia’s National Tidal Centre, based at the Bureau of Meteorology in Adelaide, which operates the only Pacific-wide equipment to measure sea level rises… These have revealed that the Pacific countries - especially those in the west and nearer the equator, mostly Melanesian and Micronesian islands - are seeing sea level rises of about 5mm a year, compared with an average global rise of about 3mm.
These figures are further complicated by satellite altimeter measurements, which, the National Tidal Centre says, “show evidence of a decadal slosh of Pacific sea level, with sea levels having risen in the southwest Pacific and fallen in the northwest Pacific since 1992”. ...
Sydney University geography professor John Connell has explained, though, that other factors besides global warming that have probably affected Tuvalu’s vulnerability include the construction of new roads between islands, the sealing of an airport runway, removing vegetation, land reclamation, sea wall construction and mining for sand used in construction. ..
Ursula Rakova, 43, who grew up on the Carterets - six tiny atolls around a lagoon 25km across-- is visiting Australia with the Australian Conservation Foundation… She acknowledges that a contributory factor is that the islands are located on top of an underwater volcano, which is steadily subsiding, but says she believes climate change is another factor.
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For your BA in Howard Hating, learn this…
Andrew Bolt
How the University of New England teaches modern Australian history. From the disgraceful course notes prepared by one or more of the above staff:
Topic Nine: The Howard Years, 1996-2007
In the mid-1990s, many families, who traditionally would have been categorised as working class, were facing high rates of unemployment and high interest rates… Given that migrants, ethnic minorities and Indigenous people make up a very visible component of the community receiving welfare it is not by chance that the Coalition appealed to traditional Labor working class voters by driving a political wedge between the conjured “deserving” and “undeserving” groups in society, thus indirectly tapping into racial prejudices and antipathy towards welfare recipients.
What ought to have been perceived as a straightforward economic issue became twisted, and in some minds interpreted in a xenophobic context… What Howard did was exploit, and bring into the open (he would likely argue that he removed the pall of political correctness), a mind-set which viewed welfare dependency, unionism, migrants, Indigenous rights and asylum seekers as factors contributing to Australia‘s economic decline. For Howard battlers these factors were perceived as undermining their economic and social security, and were seen as a threat to their future.
The Howard years offended the sensibilities of many while giving expression to the sentiments of others. Arguably the political and ideological chasms between differing divisions in society were exposed and amplified, resulting in confrontation and in some instances, such as the Cronulla Riots, actual physical violence…
Even before the 1996 general election John Howard had been accused of being backward looking, as someone seeking to return Australia to a simpler, less complicated time when entrenched conservative values held sway. This yesterday‘s man portrayal of Howard, and his supposed backward looking desire to return Australia to the 1950s era of ?Menzian‘ and monarchist values, is but one of many interpretations of his character. But it is the one that struck an accord with many people. The reality was that although he presided over a period of Australian history where there was a retreat to a conservative ethos and an apparent narrowing of society‘s vision, seen by some as a loss of tolerance, that this actually masked considerable change in outlook as well as forcing a confrontation with some deeper and darker aspects of the Australian psyche and its past such as reconciliation, mandatory detention of asylum seekers and racism. These are issues that this topic will explore, along with other aspects of the treatment of asylum seekers, Indigenous relations, ethnicity and multiculturalism, One Nation, industrial relations and the “war on terror‘. These subjects were all seen as important realms of debates that highlight internal social divisiveness that many commentators have seen as characterising the Howard years...
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Trad trodden
Andrew Bolt
Keysar Trad, the long-time spokesman and apologist for the then Mufti of Australia, is indeed a racist and a bigot:
KEYSAR Trad, the longtime spokesman for Muslim cleric Sheik Taj bin al-Hilaly, has been described as “racist” and “offensive” by a judge who today rejected his defamation claim against radio station 2GB…
“There is little doubt that many of the plaintiff’s remarks are offensive to Jewish persons and homosexuals,” Justice McClellan said in his judgment.
“Many of his remarks are distasteful and appear to condone violence. I’m satisfied that the plaintiff does hold views which can properly be described as racist. I’m also satisfied that he encourages others to hold those views. In particular he holds views derogatory of Jewish people. The views which he holds would not be acceptable to most right-thinking Australians.”
Mr Trad, who founded the Islamic Friendship Association, faces up to $400,000 in court costs and there are question marks over his credibility after Justice McClellan’s scathing judgment.
During the trial he was subjected to close scrutiny about his public profile as Sheik Hilaly’s right-hand man and he frequent statements he made to ”clarify” the controversial views of the cleric.
Our Muslim community has been betrayed by its choice of spokesmen. A small blessing is that Hilaly has since been dumped as Mufti, and Trad gets a much smaller run from the media than he was once so irresponsibly and undeservedly granted.
BTW, how dare Trad try to use the courts to shut up criticism of his outrageous views and activities, which included translating for the pro-bin Laden Islamic Youth Movement. Lovely that it’s backfired on him.
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Why are warming alarmists so rude so often?
Andrew Bolt
When you’ve got no facts, this is all you’re left with when you disrupt a public presentation to challenge a warming sceptic like Professor Ian Plimer:
Tensions reached boiling when a guest jumped out of his chair to accuse Prof Plimer of hypocrisy and even said: ”Are you going to come and punch me in the face.” The man eventually took his seat after Prof Plimer said “he was displaying the height of bad manners which indicates ill-breeding”.
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Enough with this carp
Andrew Bolt
A lot of scientists have finally had it up to here with their cause-pushing colleagues:
An outpouring of skeptical scientists who are members of the American Chemical Society (ACS) are revolting against the group’s editor-in-chief — with some demanding he be removed — after an editorial appeared claiming “the science of anthropogenic climate change is becoming increasingly well established.”
The editorial claimed the “consensus” view was growing “increasingly difficult to challenge, despite the efforts of diehard climate-change deniers.” The editor now admits he is “startled” by the negative reaction from the group’s scientific members. The American Chemical Society bills itself as the “world’s largest scientific society.”
The June 22, 2009 editorial in Chemical and Engineering News by editor in chief Rudy Baum, is facing widespread blowback and condemnation from American Chemical Society member scientists. Baum concluded his editorial by stating that “deniers” are attempting to “derail meaningful efforts to respond to global climate change.”
Dozens of letters from ACS members were published on July 27, 2009 castigating Baum, with some scientists calling for his replacement as editor-in-chief.
When this hysteria has finally passed there will be an accounting. Those who sold out science for fame, fortune and flim-flam will be made to pay.
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Rudd’s tick-tick-tick deceit
Andrew Bolt
Check out the ludicrous countdown clock on Labor’s website, as it tries to build up an air of tick-tick-tick urgency to a vote in just 13 days on its disastrous emissions trading scheme:
Countdown for Climate Change Vote
The truth is not only that the scheme will kill jobs, will fail to halt our growth in emissions and won’t make a blind bit of difference to world temperatures anyway. Fact is, even some of the world’s leading warming hysterics admit there’s no urgency at all to the vote, whatever Kevin Rudd so dishonestly claims:
IT won’t matter if Australia doesn’t have its emissions trading scheme finalised by December’s Copenhagen climate change talks, the head of the UN’s climate change agency says.
Other nations will only care that the Federal Government has made a commitment to reduce emissions targets ahead of the summit, Yvo de Boer says....
But when asked whether it mattered if Australia arrived at Copenhagen in December with a scheme in place, he replied: “Quite honestly no.”
There are, in fact, just three reasons why Rudd wants the vote held so fast, before the rest of the world makes even the slightest move to follow our useless lead:
1. Pure politics - Rudd wants the Liberals to reject his bill (as they will) to give him an excuse for an early election.
2. Pure vanity - Rudd wants a fluff his feathers at Copenhagen as a world leader on a UN crusade like climate change, to push his claim to be the next UN secretary general.
3. Pure fear - Rudd knows that the Copenhagen summit in December will produce no binding plans from the rest of the world to cut their gases, too, which will makes Rudd’s own emissions trading scheme much harder to sell after the summit than it is now.
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Crisis meeting
Andrew Bolt
Isn’t this humiliating? Here’s a president of the world’s greatest super-power having to pour drinks for a police officer and an over-excited professor after he foolishly got involved in a trumped-up claim of racism.
You’d hesitate to send in even a negotiator from the local council for something so trivial, yet Barack brought even his vice president for support:
President Barack Obama is hailing his meeting with professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and policeman James Crowley as a “friendly, thoughtful conversation.”
In a statement after the three men and Vice President Joe Biden chatted over beers, Obama said he learned that Gates and Crowley had already spent some time talking with each other. He called that “a testament to them
When Obama must get involved so intensely in a stupid argument like this, how on earth will he go in a war?
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Arbib chokes on Rudd’s deceit
Andrew Bolt
Employment Participation Minister Mark Arbib gets in a terrible tangle on Sky News trying to justify Kevin Rudd’s false claim (see column below) that he’s creating 50,000 green positions.
David Speers: Does that mean that you are calling this a job or does that mean they’ll be remaining on the unemployment benefit?
Arbib: No, well, this is ... yeah this is a work experience program.
Speers: Is it a job or is it a work experience program?
Arbib: A work experience program is a job. They’ll be actually working during this time.
Speers: When you say it’s a job, do they get sick leave? Do they get superannuation? How is it just not the same as the work for the dole scheme?
Arbib: Well, I don’t have all the details.
Speers: But you’re the minister.
Arbib: Well, I am, but I don’t have all the details today for you mate. But what I can tell you ...
Speers: But it’s just been announced by the Prime Minister.
Arbib: 10,000 young people, 26 weeks’ training, plus work, day after day, it’s a great, great result.
Speers: But it is still being worked out.
Arbib: No, no, this scheme will be under way in January 2010, and obviously some of the detail will still have to be finalised, but ...
Speers: Is one of those details whether it will be a job or work experience?
Arbib: Well, well ... it’s a fine line but can I tell you it is work experience. Work experience is a job.
The excruciating video is here.
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Of Sandilands and dirty paws
Andrew Bolt
In the toilet at my work hangs a new sign, of the kind no one thought necessary in the days before the rise of Kyle Sandilands.
It’s from the Commonwealth of Australia, which realises it’s now the last authority left to teach us the most basic of manners.
Stamped with the Commonwealth seal, it begins: “How to wash and dry hands.”
What follows are detailed instructions, with drawings of hands in helpful poses for those who’ve failed to learn not only the art of keeping their paws clean, but even the skill of reading words such as “Wet hands with warm water” without pictorial assistance.
The Commonwealth has since supplied a follow-up lesson for the cleverer of the simians it’s trying so urgently to civilise.
So in our toilet hangs a second sign for those who graduated from its course on how to scrape the dung from their palms. This one is on how to cough in public, again with useful pictures for apes whose low brows furrow at words as hard as: “When coughing or sneezing use a tissue to cover your nose and mouth.”
No doubt it won’t be long before the Commonwealth rushes out chapter three of its Manners for the Modern Moron, “How to wipe your backside.” But the question is when it will get far enough down its how-to list to finally reach the chapter that Sandilands, the top-rating FM radio star, so badly needs to have stapled to his hide.
I’m talking about the one headed: “How to not publicly humiliate a 14-year-old girl who’s been raped.”
Again, before Sandilands hosted Sydney’s most popular FM breakfast show and became a star on Melbourne’s Fox FM, as well, I’d bet none of you would have dreamed that a sane adult needed to be taught any such thing.
But just as we’ve forgotten even how to wash our hands or avoid hacking phlegm into people’s faces, we’ve forgotten, too, why it’s barbaric to make sport of girls just 14 having sex.
Two days ago, Sandilands and his sidekick, Jackie O, brought into their studio a woman so keen for a couple of free concert tickets that she’d prostitute her daughter - in the figurative sense, I mean. So she’d dragged in her 14-year-old for a segment in which contestants are strapped to Sandilands’ lie detector for the hur-hur-hur of apes everywhere.
So what did she want to ask her daughter, she was asked as drooling listeners lifted their hairy ears.
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From real jobs to green ones
Andrew Bolt
FIRST Kevin Rudd tells you we’re heating to hell when the planet has actually cooled for eight years.
Now he’s claiming that the colossal tax on emissions he’s imposing to “stop” this (non) warming will create more jobs than it will kill.
And if you believe that, you deserve precisely what you’re going to get.
Yesterday the Prime Minister gave a speech to the national Labor conference that showed he’s feeling more heat than he’s let on from the sceptics he’s claimed barely exist.
“The climate change sceptics constantly scaremonger about the possible loss of jobs through the transition to a lower carbon economy,” he complained.
“But they constantly fail to talk about the new clean energy jobs of the future which will arise from the introduction of the carbon pollution reduction scheme, the renewable energy target and energy efficiency measures in the future.”
In fact, Rudd announced, he’d now spend yet another $94 million (of money he no longer has) to “create 50,000 new green jobs, traineeships and apprenticeships”. Sound good?
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The price of green stupidity just went up
Andrew Bolt
The promise in 2007:
THE controversial $3.1 billion Wonthaggi desalination plant will be built as one of Victoria’s biggest public-private partnerships.
The promise in 2009:
The Victorian Government announced today that AquaSure will build the $3.5 billion plant at Wonthaggi .
That’s already a $400 million blowout, even before a brick is laid. And as the costs mount, the jobs shrink.
The 2007 promise:
The economic impact study, by Monash University, found the plant would create 3180 direct and indirect jobs, with 150 full-time jobs in operating the plant.
The 2009 promise:
...in a project expected to generate 1700 new jobs...
I’m not sure at all these people know what they are doing. Especially when the alternative was this:
Yet Melbourne Water ... admits (a Mitchell River) dam would cost just $1.35 billion—less than half the price of the desalination plant, but producing three times the water.
Of course, with this price blowout, a dam would now be around a third of the price for three times the water. And that’s even without adding the cost of the power a desal plant would suck up.
This green faith - and the ban it’s imposed on new dams - is costing us billions.
UPDATE
Uh oh:
Crucial financial details — including how much taxpayers will pay at times when the plant is not producing water — will remain secret until the deal is finalised in September…
The chairman of the winning consortium, Tony Shepherd, said AquaSure had secured $800 million in equity and $4 billion in debt, and would now seek to sell down its debt to superannuation funds. Premier John Brumby said the Government would take the debt off the consortium’s hands at commercial rates if buyers for the debt could not be found. But Mr Brumby stressed he did not expect this to occur.
Of course, the minute a government takes on a debt that no one else wants, the rate is no longer commercial.
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Stupidity taxed
Andrew Bolt
Paying more for nothing? Why does every green fad seem the same?
Organic food has no nutritional or health benefits over ordinary food, according to a major study published Wednesday. Researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said consumers were paying higher prices for organic food because of its perceived health benefits, creating a global organic market worth an estimated $48 billion in 2007.
A systematic review of 162 scientific papers published in the scientific literature over the last 50 years, however, found there was no significant difference.
In reporting this news, The Age, otherwise known as The Daily Lentil, interviews three locals - two organic food extremists who dismiss the science, and one consumer advocate who wishes butchers would advertise organic meat more conscientiously. A bit like their global warming, coverage, actually.
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Farrelly gases on
Andrew Bolt
The Sydney Morning Herald’s Elizabeth Farrelly in a pulpit:
The climate-change crisis begins, similarly, with the fond belief that we can all live four times plumper than most historical royalty, and builds to the point where only the tyranny we will never accept can save us… But Australia charges blindly off in another direction, happily expelling more and more carbon dioxide, like Wall-E’s screen-bound space-floating fatties. Still, they learned to walk again, on their own pudgy feet. Perhaps we, on a new low-carbon diet, can do the same?
The Sydney Morning Herald’s Elizabeth Farrelly in a four-wheel drive:
It’s a point that remakes itself at every step of our 8000-kilometre swag through the Big Empty, from Sydney to the Alice and back.
Hmm, remind me again what Farrelly once wrote about such fossil-fueled excesses?
Even without climate change, there’s still the filth, waste and breathtaking short-termism of a fossil fuel economy.
That’s the one.
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Caldicott beached
Andrew Bolt
From the Sydney Morning Herald’s profile of anti-nuclear hysteric Helen Caldicott:
“I haven’t retired, I think I never will,” says Caldicott, who has been passionate about anti-nuclear issues since reading Neville Shute’s novel On The Beach as a 15-year-old.
This puzzles JF Beck:
On the Beach was published in 1957; Caldicott was born in 1938. Believe this woman at your peril.
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Is America an Unfair Country?
By Bill O'Reilly
Behind all the bloviating on government-run health care lies a simple question: Are we a fair country? Is the USA a rigged game, or does everyone have a chance at a good life and good health?
Government-mandated health care would be the most expensive entitlement in history, and passions are running high on both sides. To make your decision, it is important to understand the truth behind the debate and the vision that President Obama holds.
Liberal Americans generally believe that the country has been unfair to the poor, that folks with little money should receive a major helping hand from folks who have money. Conservatives tend to believe that the government should stay out of economic pursuits and allow folks to compete. Whether they win or lose is not the government's business.
President Obama is a classic liberal, a man who wants the federal government to provide as much as possible to the poor. Mr. Obama believes in economic and social justice being imposed from Washington. But the vast majority of the folks are against him on that.
A new Rasmussen Poll says 65 percent of Americans want fewer services and lower taxes from the federal government. And 69 percent of us believe the USA is a fair and decent country just the way it is.
"Talking Points" believes Americans were ready to listen to President Obama's health care vision because medical care is much too expensive in this country. But Mr. Obama has not been able to articulate specifics, instead falling back on confusing scenarios and ideology.
On Wednesday in a North Carolina town hall meeting, the president once again spoke long and said little. Many folks looked like they were transported back to a high school physics class. In fact, we could not pull one interesting sound-bite from this exposition. Not one.
The truth is that the economic and social justice theory is not taking root in America, and President Obama is being stymied by that. We are a hardworking country that gives more to charity than any other people on Earth. But we do not respect handouts, especially when they might bankrupt the nation.
That is Obama's dilemma. The folks are not with him philosophically, and I don't believe they ever will be.
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Kyle, Jackie O stunt 'child abuse'
RADIO rape stunt on teen girl should be treated as child abuse, say prominent Australians.
Australian tourism 'on life support'
TOURISM'S worst year in decades won't go away with the crisis expected to hit new lows. - Thank you Rudd. -ed.
Terrified family flees pervert grandad
A GRANDFATHER who repeatedly raped his 8-year-old granddaughter remains free, leaving his victim sick with fear.
'Dying patient' admits cancer con
A WOMAN has admitted that she faked having terminal cancer to con money from members of her sympathetic community.
Mum of 13 vows to keep number 14
A MUM banned from raising her kids says she'll keep having them until authorities let her keep one.
79-year-old hoon to get car impounded
MAN caught doing 160km/h told cops "it was lucky you didn't get me before, I was going faster".
Good Samaritans sacked over sandwich
TWO council workers were sacked after they received free food for helping the elderly.
Miss Universe Australia Rachael Finch flees monster croc
MISS Universe Australia Rachael Finch met some crocodiles during her Northern Territory visit yesterday and had to run for her life when a 5m croc named Eric lunged at her.
Men, women see differently - study
MEN are better at seeing things in the distance due to their hunter-gatherer past chasing animals, while women are better focusing on things at close range, a British study said.
=== Comments ===
Aussie left to rot away in a foreign hell hole
Piers Akerman
EVER since Australia elected its first diplomat prime minister, the nation’s foreign relations have been in a downward spiral.
Those trapped between Kevin Rudd’s UN ambitions and his attempts to curry favour with tin-pot Third World dictatorships are paying a cruel penalty.
One such is Perth’s Peter Gray, held in Mauritius for four years without charge on trumped-up heroin accusations.
Foreign Affairs Minister Stephen Smith has made it clear that Gray is on his own. So much so, that Smith’s department cancelled Gray’s passport - on information provided by Mauritius police
In correspondence between Smith and Gray’s relatives, Smith flatly noted: “There is no requirement under section 13 of the Passport Act for a person to be actually charged prior to the cancellation of a passport.” - That sound you hear from the busy offices of Australian Government under the ALP is Smith washing his hands of Australia's obligations. At least Gray hails from WA, and they have a Liberal government. Maybe he can get some support from them. I'm reminded of how Bob Carr in NSW promised in 2004 that NSW would not go to war in Iraq .. and they didn't. Until then, I hadn't been aware that states could cover for the inability of the ALP to be sensible in any form of government. So powerful are these lesser Government bodies under the ALP I half expect the Fairfield Mayor knock back a sister city arrangement with the Great Consumer Al Gore. - ed.
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SAD TRAD
Tim Blair
An interesting result:
Islamic identity Keysar Trad’s defamation case against a Sydney radio station has collapsed, with a Supreme Court justice saying Trad did in fact make remarks that were “offensive’’, “racist’’ and “condone violence’’.
Friday’s judgment comes in opposition to a jury’s decision in 2007 which found Mr Trad was defamed by broadcaster Jason Morrison, who implied that he was a disgraceful, dangerous individual who incited people to commit violent acts.
Trad’s lawyers have indicated he will appeal the decision.
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FREE MONEY STOPPED
Tim Blair
It was fun for the six days it lasted:
Congressional officials say the government plans to suspend the popular “cash for clunkers” program amid concerns it could quickly use up the $1 billion in rebates for new car purchases.
The Transportation Department called congressional offices late Thursday to alert them to the decision to halt the program, which offered owners of old cars and trucks $3,500 or $4,500 toward a new, more fuel-efficient vehicle.
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STANCE TAKEN
Tim Blair
Yes, I am opposed to gay divorce.
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Labor’s pay to play
Andrew Bolt
What else will Labor sell them?
AT 8am today, the Labor Party will sweep aside a velvet rope at the Sydney Convention Centre and beckon in an exclusive coterie of ticket holders.
Together, these 100 business leaders paying $7500 each will pour almost $1 million into ALP coffers in exchange for some face time with government ministers on the sidelines of the party’s national conference.
The ALP’s cash-for-access program could provide a real-time case study for the Crime and Misconduct Commission as it looks into this pay-per-view style of political fundraising.
===
Just blame warming instead
Andrew Bolt
Yet another blame-global-warming stunt by people with their hands out:
THREE of Australia’s biggest non-government organisations are hosting competing visits by Pacific Islanders to urge Kevin Rudd to do more to combat climate change - and especially rising sea levels… Oxfam and Greenpeace are hosting a visit about the impact of climate change from Pelenise Alofa Pilitati, managing director of a Kiribati NGO; Reverend Tafue Lusama, chairman of the Tuvalu Climate Action Network; and Marstella Jack, former attorney-general of the Federated States of Micronesia.
Sadly for them, reporter Rowan Callick wasn’t born yesterday:
Bill Mitchell, who manages the South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project that provides the only observed data for the region, said its records only extended to almost 20 years.
“It is not clear yet what contribution long-term climate change is making to sea levels, but we are getting there,” he said....
The Oxfam report does not, however, cite the South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project, which is run by Australia’s National Tidal Centre, based at the Bureau of Meteorology in Adelaide, which operates the only Pacific-wide equipment to measure sea level rises… These have revealed that the Pacific countries - especially those in the west and nearer the equator, mostly Melanesian and Micronesian islands - are seeing sea level rises of about 5mm a year, compared with an average global rise of about 3mm.
These figures are further complicated by satellite altimeter measurements, which, the National Tidal Centre says, “show evidence of a decadal slosh of Pacific sea level, with sea levels having risen in the southwest Pacific and fallen in the northwest Pacific since 1992”. ...
Sydney University geography professor John Connell has explained, though, that other factors besides global warming that have probably affected Tuvalu’s vulnerability include the construction of new roads between islands, the sealing of an airport runway, removing vegetation, land reclamation, sea wall construction and mining for sand used in construction. ..
Ursula Rakova, 43, who grew up on the Carterets - six tiny atolls around a lagoon 25km across-- is visiting Australia with the Australian Conservation Foundation… She acknowledges that a contributory factor is that the islands are located on top of an underwater volcano, which is steadily subsiding, but says she believes climate change is another factor.
===
For your BA in Howard Hating, learn this…
Andrew Bolt
How the University of New England teaches modern Australian history. From the disgraceful course notes prepared by one or more of the above staff:
Topic Nine: The Howard Years, 1996-2007
In the mid-1990s, many families, who traditionally would have been categorised as working class, were facing high rates of unemployment and high interest rates… Given that migrants, ethnic minorities and Indigenous people make up a very visible component of the community receiving welfare it is not by chance that the Coalition appealed to traditional Labor working class voters by driving a political wedge between the conjured “deserving” and “undeserving” groups in society, thus indirectly tapping into racial prejudices and antipathy towards welfare recipients.
What ought to have been perceived as a straightforward economic issue became twisted, and in some minds interpreted in a xenophobic context… What Howard did was exploit, and bring into the open (he would likely argue that he removed the pall of political correctness), a mind-set which viewed welfare dependency, unionism, migrants, Indigenous rights and asylum seekers as factors contributing to Australia‘s economic decline. For Howard battlers these factors were perceived as undermining their economic and social security, and were seen as a threat to their future.
The Howard years offended the sensibilities of many while giving expression to the sentiments of others. Arguably the political and ideological chasms between differing divisions in society were exposed and amplified, resulting in confrontation and in some instances, such as the Cronulla Riots, actual physical violence…
Even before the 1996 general election John Howard had been accused of being backward looking, as someone seeking to return Australia to a simpler, less complicated time when entrenched conservative values held sway. This yesterday‘s man portrayal of Howard, and his supposed backward looking desire to return Australia to the 1950s era of ?Menzian‘ and monarchist values, is but one of many interpretations of his character. But it is the one that struck an accord with many people. The reality was that although he presided over a period of Australian history where there was a retreat to a conservative ethos and an apparent narrowing of society‘s vision, seen by some as a loss of tolerance, that this actually masked considerable change in outlook as well as forcing a confrontation with some deeper and darker aspects of the Australian psyche and its past such as reconciliation, mandatory detention of asylum seekers and racism. These are issues that this topic will explore, along with other aspects of the treatment of asylum seekers, Indigenous relations, ethnicity and multiculturalism, One Nation, industrial relations and the “war on terror‘. These subjects were all seen as important realms of debates that highlight internal social divisiveness that many commentators have seen as characterising the Howard years...
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Trad trodden
Andrew Bolt
Keysar Trad, the long-time spokesman and apologist for the then Mufti of Australia, is indeed a racist and a bigot:
KEYSAR Trad, the longtime spokesman for Muslim cleric Sheik Taj bin al-Hilaly, has been described as “racist” and “offensive” by a judge who today rejected his defamation claim against radio station 2GB…
“There is little doubt that many of the plaintiff’s remarks are offensive to Jewish persons and homosexuals,” Justice McClellan said in his judgment.
“Many of his remarks are distasteful and appear to condone violence. I’m satisfied that the plaintiff does hold views which can properly be described as racist. I’m also satisfied that he encourages others to hold those views. In particular he holds views derogatory of Jewish people. The views which he holds would not be acceptable to most right-thinking Australians.”
Mr Trad, who founded the Islamic Friendship Association, faces up to $400,000 in court costs and there are question marks over his credibility after Justice McClellan’s scathing judgment.
During the trial he was subjected to close scrutiny about his public profile as Sheik Hilaly’s right-hand man and he frequent statements he made to ”clarify” the controversial views of the cleric.
Our Muslim community has been betrayed by its choice of spokesmen. A small blessing is that Hilaly has since been dumped as Mufti, and Trad gets a much smaller run from the media than he was once so irresponsibly and undeservedly granted.
BTW, how dare Trad try to use the courts to shut up criticism of his outrageous views and activities, which included translating for the pro-bin Laden Islamic Youth Movement. Lovely that it’s backfired on him.
===
Why are warming alarmists so rude so often?
Andrew Bolt
When you’ve got no facts, this is all you’re left with when you disrupt a public presentation to challenge a warming sceptic like Professor Ian Plimer:
Tensions reached boiling when a guest jumped out of his chair to accuse Prof Plimer of hypocrisy and even said: ”Are you going to come and punch me in the face.” The man eventually took his seat after Prof Plimer said “he was displaying the height of bad manners which indicates ill-breeding”.
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Enough with this carp
Andrew Bolt
A lot of scientists have finally had it up to here with their cause-pushing colleagues:
An outpouring of skeptical scientists who are members of the American Chemical Society (ACS) are revolting against the group’s editor-in-chief — with some demanding he be removed — after an editorial appeared claiming “the science of anthropogenic climate change is becoming increasingly well established.”
The editorial claimed the “consensus” view was growing “increasingly difficult to challenge, despite the efforts of diehard climate-change deniers.” The editor now admits he is “startled” by the negative reaction from the group’s scientific members. The American Chemical Society bills itself as the “world’s largest scientific society.”
The June 22, 2009 editorial in Chemical and Engineering News by editor in chief Rudy Baum, is facing widespread blowback and condemnation from American Chemical Society member scientists. Baum concluded his editorial by stating that “deniers” are attempting to “derail meaningful efforts to respond to global climate change.”
Dozens of letters from ACS members were published on July 27, 2009 castigating Baum, with some scientists calling for his replacement as editor-in-chief.
When this hysteria has finally passed there will be an accounting. Those who sold out science for fame, fortune and flim-flam will be made to pay.
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Rudd’s tick-tick-tick deceit
Andrew Bolt
Check out the ludicrous countdown clock on Labor’s website, as it tries to build up an air of tick-tick-tick urgency to a vote in just 13 days on its disastrous emissions trading scheme:
Countdown for Climate Change Vote
The truth is not only that the scheme will kill jobs, will fail to halt our growth in emissions and won’t make a blind bit of difference to world temperatures anyway. Fact is, even some of the world’s leading warming hysterics admit there’s no urgency at all to the vote, whatever Kevin Rudd so dishonestly claims:
IT won’t matter if Australia doesn’t have its emissions trading scheme finalised by December’s Copenhagen climate change talks, the head of the UN’s climate change agency says.
Other nations will only care that the Federal Government has made a commitment to reduce emissions targets ahead of the summit, Yvo de Boer says....
But when asked whether it mattered if Australia arrived at Copenhagen in December with a scheme in place, he replied: “Quite honestly no.”
There are, in fact, just three reasons why Rudd wants the vote held so fast, before the rest of the world makes even the slightest move to follow our useless lead:
1. Pure politics - Rudd wants the Liberals to reject his bill (as they will) to give him an excuse for an early election.
2. Pure vanity - Rudd wants a fluff his feathers at Copenhagen as a world leader on a UN crusade like climate change, to push his claim to be the next UN secretary general.
3. Pure fear - Rudd knows that the Copenhagen summit in December will produce no binding plans from the rest of the world to cut their gases, too, which will makes Rudd’s own emissions trading scheme much harder to sell after the summit than it is now.
===
Crisis meeting
Andrew Bolt
Isn’t this humiliating? Here’s a president of the world’s greatest super-power having to pour drinks for a police officer and an over-excited professor after he foolishly got involved in a trumped-up claim of racism.
You’d hesitate to send in even a negotiator from the local council for something so trivial, yet Barack brought even his vice president for support:
President Barack Obama is hailing his meeting with professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and policeman James Crowley as a “friendly, thoughtful conversation.”
In a statement after the three men and Vice President Joe Biden chatted over beers, Obama said he learned that Gates and Crowley had already spent some time talking with each other. He called that “a testament to them
When Obama must get involved so intensely in a stupid argument like this, how on earth will he go in a war?
===
Arbib chokes on Rudd’s deceit
Andrew Bolt
Employment Participation Minister Mark Arbib gets in a terrible tangle on Sky News trying to justify Kevin Rudd’s false claim (see column below) that he’s creating 50,000 green positions.
David Speers: Does that mean that you are calling this a job or does that mean they’ll be remaining on the unemployment benefit?
Arbib: No, well, this is ... yeah this is a work experience program.
Speers: Is it a job or is it a work experience program?
Arbib: A work experience program is a job. They’ll be actually working during this time.
Speers: When you say it’s a job, do they get sick leave? Do they get superannuation? How is it just not the same as the work for the dole scheme?
Arbib: Well, I don’t have all the details.
Speers: But you’re the minister.
Arbib: Well, I am, but I don’t have all the details today for you mate. But what I can tell you ...
Speers: But it’s just been announced by the Prime Minister.
Arbib: 10,000 young people, 26 weeks’ training, plus work, day after day, it’s a great, great result.
Speers: But it is still being worked out.
Arbib: No, no, this scheme will be under way in January 2010, and obviously some of the detail will still have to be finalised, but ...
Speers: Is one of those details whether it will be a job or work experience?
Arbib: Well, well ... it’s a fine line but can I tell you it is work experience. Work experience is a job.
The excruciating video is here.
===
Of Sandilands and dirty paws
Andrew Bolt
In the toilet at my work hangs a new sign, of the kind no one thought necessary in the days before the rise of Kyle Sandilands.
It’s from the Commonwealth of Australia, which realises it’s now the last authority left to teach us the most basic of manners.
Stamped with the Commonwealth seal, it begins: “How to wash and dry hands.”
What follows are detailed instructions, with drawings of hands in helpful poses for those who’ve failed to learn not only the art of keeping their paws clean, but even the skill of reading words such as “Wet hands with warm water” without pictorial assistance.
The Commonwealth has since supplied a follow-up lesson for the cleverer of the simians it’s trying so urgently to civilise.
So in our toilet hangs a second sign for those who graduated from its course on how to scrape the dung from their palms. This one is on how to cough in public, again with useful pictures for apes whose low brows furrow at words as hard as: “When coughing or sneezing use a tissue to cover your nose and mouth.”
No doubt it won’t be long before the Commonwealth rushes out chapter three of its Manners for the Modern Moron, “How to wipe your backside.” But the question is when it will get far enough down its how-to list to finally reach the chapter that Sandilands, the top-rating FM radio star, so badly needs to have stapled to his hide.
I’m talking about the one headed: “How to not publicly humiliate a 14-year-old girl who’s been raped.”
Again, before Sandilands hosted Sydney’s most popular FM breakfast show and became a star on Melbourne’s Fox FM, as well, I’d bet none of you would have dreamed that a sane adult needed to be taught any such thing.
But just as we’ve forgotten even how to wash our hands or avoid hacking phlegm into people’s faces, we’ve forgotten, too, why it’s barbaric to make sport of girls just 14 having sex.
Two days ago, Sandilands and his sidekick, Jackie O, brought into their studio a woman so keen for a couple of free concert tickets that she’d prostitute her daughter - in the figurative sense, I mean. So she’d dragged in her 14-year-old for a segment in which contestants are strapped to Sandilands’ lie detector for the hur-hur-hur of apes everywhere.
So what did she want to ask her daughter, she was asked as drooling listeners lifted their hairy ears.
===
From real jobs to green ones
Andrew Bolt
FIRST Kevin Rudd tells you we’re heating to hell when the planet has actually cooled for eight years.
Now he’s claiming that the colossal tax on emissions he’s imposing to “stop” this (non) warming will create more jobs than it will kill.
And if you believe that, you deserve precisely what you’re going to get.
Yesterday the Prime Minister gave a speech to the national Labor conference that showed he’s feeling more heat than he’s let on from the sceptics he’s claimed barely exist.
“The climate change sceptics constantly scaremonger about the possible loss of jobs through the transition to a lower carbon economy,” he complained.
“But they constantly fail to talk about the new clean energy jobs of the future which will arise from the introduction of the carbon pollution reduction scheme, the renewable energy target and energy efficiency measures in the future.”
In fact, Rudd announced, he’d now spend yet another $94 million (of money he no longer has) to “create 50,000 new green jobs, traineeships and apprenticeships”. Sound good?
===
The price of green stupidity just went up
Andrew Bolt
The promise in 2007:
THE controversial $3.1 billion Wonthaggi desalination plant will be built as one of Victoria’s biggest public-private partnerships.
The promise in 2009:
The Victorian Government announced today that AquaSure will build the $3.5 billion plant at Wonthaggi .
That’s already a $400 million blowout, even before a brick is laid. And as the costs mount, the jobs shrink.
The 2007 promise:
The economic impact study, by Monash University, found the plant would create 3180 direct and indirect jobs, with 150 full-time jobs in operating the plant.
The 2009 promise:
...in a project expected to generate 1700 new jobs...
I’m not sure at all these people know what they are doing. Especially when the alternative was this:
Yet Melbourne Water ... admits (a Mitchell River) dam would cost just $1.35 billion—less than half the price of the desalination plant, but producing three times the water.
Of course, with this price blowout, a dam would now be around a third of the price for three times the water. And that’s even without adding the cost of the power a desal plant would suck up.
This green faith - and the ban it’s imposed on new dams - is costing us billions.
UPDATE
Uh oh:
Crucial financial details — including how much taxpayers will pay at times when the plant is not producing water — will remain secret until the deal is finalised in September…
The chairman of the winning consortium, Tony Shepherd, said AquaSure had secured $800 million in equity and $4 billion in debt, and would now seek to sell down its debt to superannuation funds. Premier John Brumby said the Government would take the debt off the consortium’s hands at commercial rates if buyers for the debt could not be found. But Mr Brumby stressed he did not expect this to occur.
Of course, the minute a government takes on a debt that no one else wants, the rate is no longer commercial.
===
Stupidity taxed
Andrew Bolt
Paying more for nothing? Why does every green fad seem the same?
Organic food has no nutritional or health benefits over ordinary food, according to a major study published Wednesday. Researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said consumers were paying higher prices for organic food because of its perceived health benefits, creating a global organic market worth an estimated $48 billion in 2007.
A systematic review of 162 scientific papers published in the scientific literature over the last 50 years, however, found there was no significant difference.
In reporting this news, The Age, otherwise known as The Daily Lentil, interviews three locals - two organic food extremists who dismiss the science, and one consumer advocate who wishes butchers would advertise organic meat more conscientiously. A bit like their global warming, coverage, actually.
===
Farrelly gases on
Andrew Bolt
The Sydney Morning Herald’s Elizabeth Farrelly in a pulpit:
The climate-change crisis begins, similarly, with the fond belief that we can all live four times plumper than most historical royalty, and builds to the point where only the tyranny we will never accept can save us… But Australia charges blindly off in another direction, happily expelling more and more carbon dioxide, like Wall-E’s screen-bound space-floating fatties. Still, they learned to walk again, on their own pudgy feet. Perhaps we, on a new low-carbon diet, can do the same?
The Sydney Morning Herald’s Elizabeth Farrelly in a four-wheel drive:
It’s a point that remakes itself at every step of our 8000-kilometre swag through the Big Empty, from Sydney to the Alice and back.
Hmm, remind me again what Farrelly once wrote about such fossil-fueled excesses?
Even without climate change, there’s still the filth, waste and breathtaking short-termism of a fossil fuel economy.
That’s the one.
===
Caldicott beached
Andrew Bolt
From the Sydney Morning Herald’s profile of anti-nuclear hysteric Helen Caldicott:
“I haven’t retired, I think I never will,” says Caldicott, who has been passionate about anti-nuclear issues since reading Neville Shute’s novel On The Beach as a 15-year-old.
This puzzles JF Beck:
On the Beach was published in 1957; Caldicott was born in 1938. Believe this woman at your peril.
===
Is America an Unfair Country?
By Bill O'Reilly
Behind all the bloviating on government-run health care lies a simple question: Are we a fair country? Is the USA a rigged game, or does everyone have a chance at a good life and good health?
Government-mandated health care would be the most expensive entitlement in history, and passions are running high on both sides. To make your decision, it is important to understand the truth behind the debate and the vision that President Obama holds.
Liberal Americans generally believe that the country has been unfair to the poor, that folks with little money should receive a major helping hand from folks who have money. Conservatives tend to believe that the government should stay out of economic pursuits and allow folks to compete. Whether they win or lose is not the government's business.
President Obama is a classic liberal, a man who wants the federal government to provide as much as possible to the poor. Mr. Obama believes in economic and social justice being imposed from Washington. But the vast majority of the folks are against him on that.
A new Rasmussen Poll says 65 percent of Americans want fewer services and lower taxes from the federal government. And 69 percent of us believe the USA is a fair and decent country just the way it is.
"Talking Points" believes Americans were ready to listen to President Obama's health care vision because medical care is much too expensive in this country. But Mr. Obama has not been able to articulate specifics, instead falling back on confusing scenarios and ideology.
On Wednesday in a North Carolina town hall meeting, the president once again spoke long and said little. Many folks looked like they were transported back to a high school physics class. In fact, we could not pull one interesting sound-bite from this exposition. Not one.
The truth is that the economic and social justice theory is not taking root in America, and President Obama is being stymied by that. We are a hardworking country that gives more to charity than any other people on Earth. But we do not respect handouts, especially when they might bankrupt the nation.
That is Obama's dilemma. The folks are not with him philosophically, and I don't believe they ever will be.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
US Soldier Demands Apology From Senator Claire McCaskill at Town Hall
A US soldier demanded an apology from Senator Claire McCaskill at an Obamacare town hall in St. Louis, Missouri.
Dana Loesch Talks Tea Party Protesting With Greta Van Susteren
97.1 FM Talk radio host Dana Loesch talked with Greta Van Susteren about the McCaskill town hall event that turned into a Tea Party protest last night at Forest Park Community College.
Headlines Thursday 30th July 2009
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RMMB's birthday today. I still remember that first one. Many happy returns.
===
2Day ask rape victim for sex confession
2DayFM breakfast crew The Kyle and Jackie O show were left red-faced today after a lie-detector quiz about a 14-year-old’s drug and sex habits revealed that she was raped at age 12. - My mother did something similar, but far worse than this. It wasn't until I met God that I could forgive her. But she still doesn't get what she did was wrong. It was appalling to have talkback callers supporting Kyle for his 'bravery.' That such things happen is a condemnation of the silence with which I had to work in. Perhaps it would have been better if I told the world, so that others may learn from the lesson. - ed.
Lin family plead for info about murders
Devastated relatives of the murdered Lin family have made an emotional public plea for information, saying the smallest clue could help solve the gruesome killings.
Bodies found, may be missing Koreans
Police have discovered two bodies which could belong to the Korean backpackers, missing for six days in the Griffith area.
Deadlier than Black Saturday: Vics told
Victorians have been warned that the upcoming fire season could be worse than the deadly Black Saturday bushfires which left 173 people dead in their wake.
Mentally ill man held by police, dies
A large, struggling, mentally ill man died of a heart condition after he was handcuffed by police......
Stripper accused of bucks' night rape
A bucks night reveller was completely naked and on his hands and knees when he allegedly was raped......
Bomb threat clears CBD Building
Police insist a bomb threat that caused the evacuation of an entire CBD building was necessary....
People smuggler faces trial after deaths
An Indonesian man accused of a mass people smuggling operation is facing trial for allegedly......
Lost Brisbane dog found in Melbourne nine years later
A FLEA-bitten dog rescued from a squalid Melbourne backyard is to be reunited with her overjoyed Brisbane owner - nine years after she disappeared. And 17-year-old Chloe Rushby, who was only eight when her best mate disappeared, can't wait to have Muffy back in her arms.
Two speed cameras net $7 million in a year
STATE'S nastiest speed trap has caught out 71,288 motorists and raised millions for Government.
Big Macs to be sold at children's hospital
FAST food giant forced to overhaul hospital menu, but Big Macs, chips and soft drink remain. - good -ed.
=== Journalists Corner ===
Note: ON THE RECORD at 10pm
Tonight -- ON THE RECORD at 10pm - we have a special guest California Governor Schwarzenegger. As you know, California, like all of the states, has fallen on hard times but perhaps harder times than most states. Governor Schwarzenegger just signed a new budget and while you may think it has nothing to do with you, it does. California has the 8th largest economy in the world -- and your state trades with California. And guess what? The Governor has to make the same decisions your governor does: how do you decide what to cut? We asked him and he told us how he makes those decisions. Does he wish he could run for President? Who does he admire in the Republican party? He answers those questions and so much more...so don't miss this rare occasion to hear from the Governor of California!
===
Arnold's locked & loaded in a fight for California!
So how does he dig out of debt, put a dent in unemployment and deal with the democrats' tax and spend policies?
The governor lets loose!
===
Guest: Governor Jindal
Will government-run healthcare rob Americans of their insurance? Bobby Jindal reacts!
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Handcuffing Police?
Did Obama's comments about Cambridge cops hurt American law enforcement?
===
Fed-Up!
Why some states say the Government has overstepped its bounds and how they're fighting back!
=== Comments ===
INSULATION NATION
Tim Blair
Do not fear the cleanliness of tomorrow, advises Kevin Rudd:
‘‘The climate change sceptics constantly scaremonger about the possible loss of jobs through the transition to a lower carbon economy,” he said.
‘‘But they constantly fail to talk about the new clean energy jobs of the future, which will arise from the introduction of the carbon pollution reduction scheme, the renewable energy target and energy efficiency measures in the future.’’
Well, let’s talk about these new clean energy jobs of the future, then. There’s a “10,000-member national Green Jobs Corps”, which will provide six months of training to the long-term unemployed so they can … do what, exactly? And Rudd plans to train 4000 insulation installers, which should take about one minute for each of them:
And don’t forget the “6000 jobs from environmental sustainability programs in priority local economies”. I have no idea what this means.
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SMALL CHANGE
Tim Blair
He’s a serious guy:
Three months ago, President Barack Obama ordered his cabinet secretaries to find $100 million in budget cuts for the current fiscal year to emphasize the point that he, too, was serious about belt-tightening.
Bravo!
They responded with $102 million.
Hooray!
That is 0.006% of the estimated federal deficit.
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VILE KYLE
Tim Blair
Michelle Cazzulino mops the floor with Kyle Sandilands and giggling Kyle enabler Jackie O. Sandilands’ weak response to the controversy:
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FRIES WITH THAT?
Tim Blair
Academics acadoomed:
Melbourne University will slash 220 full-time academic and administrative staff because its financial position has taken a battering in the economic crisis.
But not quite the battering suffered elsewhere:
Only a year ago, Harvard had a $36.9 billion endowment, the largest in academia. Now that endowment has imploded, and the university faces the worst financial crisis in its 373-year history. Could the same lethal mix of uncurbed expansion, colossal debt, arrogance, and mismanagement that ravaged Wall Street bring down America’s most famous university?
And people thought this economic disaster was a bad thing …
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DAUGHTER PROTECTION CRIMINALISED
Tim Blair
New justice in New Zealand:
A Blenheim father has been convicted and fined $1000 for assaulting a man who wanted to have sex with his 13-year-old daughter.
Read on. The father only beat up the guy after first approaching police ("they said they were not able to assist at that stage"), a government youth care agency and a church, all of whom accomplished nothing. Finally, the 23-year-old lecher (who is referred to throughout the linked report as “the victim") wore a few Dad-delivered punches.
And the girl’s father gets fined $1000.
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Labor’s pay to play
Andrew Bolt
What else will Labor sell them?
AT 8am today, the Labor Party will sweep aside a velvet rope at the Sydney Convention Centre and beckon in an exclusive coterie of ticket holders.
Together, these 100 business leaders paying $7500 each will pour almost $1 million into ALP coffers in exchange for some face time with government ministers on the sidelines of the party’s national conference.
The ALP’s cash-for-access program could provide a real-time case study for the Crime and Misconduct Commission as it looks into this pay-per-view style of political fundraising.
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Give those sacked workers a few green collars
Andrew Bolt
Never mind the thousands of jobs Kevin Rudd will kill in mining and manufacturing with his insane mega-taxing emissions trading scheme. He’s announced at the Labor conference today that he’ll make up the loss - well, some of it:
The climate change sceptics constantly scaremonger about the possible loss of jobs through the transition to a lower carbon economy. But they constantly fail to talk about the new clean energy jobs of the future which will arise from the introduction of the carbon pollution reduction scheme, the renewable energy target and energy efficiency measures in the future.
So what are those jobs, and how much will they earn us?
Um, well, first of all they’ll actually cost us money instead:
PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd has unveiled a $100 million plan to create 50,000 green jobs and training opportunities.
Hmm. That’s not a promising start. But, OK, maybe these “green jobs” will still turn out to be real jobs, after a while, involving the making of real things, right?
Wrong:
The plan will consist of the creation of a 10,000-member national Green Jobs Corps, where long-term young jobless will take part in six months of training and work experience.
So not real jobs, then, but just a bit of training for the jobless. So what else has Rudd got?
Labor plans that 30,000 apprentices will be trained with green skills, while there will be an additional 4,000 training places for insulation installers.
So apprentices will get some “green skills”, whatever they are, but not the extra green jobs to go with them - so this promise doesn’t count, either. But, yes, there may indeed be 4000 more training places for roofing insulation installers - who need a day or so of instruction on how to lay the free pink batts the government will hand out for a short while. But still there’s no long-term, real jobs in this $100 million Rudd is now promising.
Anything else?
There will also be another 6,000 jobs from environmental sustainability programs in priority local economies.
Huh? What exactly are these jobs, and why do they sound like ones that will actually cost taxpayers, not earn their own way?
So let’s rewrite Rudd’s promise to remove the spin and deceit:
PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd has unveiled a $100 million plan to create 6000 green jobs, mostly needing future taxpayer support, plus a little green training.
And this is supposed to offset the effects of his job-killing ETS, like this one:
The CPRS scheme will shed 23,510 jobs in the minerals sector by 2020 and more than 66,000 by 2030. These are direct jobs. All minerals sectors will be affected… No state, or the Northern Territory, will be spared… :
And this, as estimated by the Energy Supply Association:
However, even with a 5 per cent reduction in 2000 level emissions at 2020, a number of power stations will need to close while others will need to substantially reduce their production to meet this target.
Think Rudd’s “green jobs” will balance that kind of economic devastation?
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But he did speak so very well
Andrew Bolt
And still Obama’s ratings fall.
Moral: you may elect a symbol, but you must live with his performance.
===
30 million died, but on the other hand…
Andrew Bolt
Karon Snowdon, reporting for the ABC’s Rear Vision, presents a potted history of China:
Influenced by the Soviet model, collectivisation and social reforms followed. While Mao’s Great Leap Forward was meant to catapult China into the big league of heavy industry, it had mixed results.
“Mixed results”? Is that the ABC’s shorthand for the brutal imposition of the mad whims of a Communist psychopath which lead to the deaths of millions? Jasper Becker’s book on this obscentity puts it rather better:
In 1984 American demographers uncovered evidence that at least 30 million people had starved to death in China between 1958 and 1962.... Based on hundreds of interviews and unpublished documents, (Becker’s book) describes how Mao Zedong created a man-made famine throughout China. Mao’s Great Leap Forward was the greatest example of Utopian engineering ever attempted. Instead, even in the richest regions, peasants died in their millions while the rest became gaunt skeletons. Through graphic eyewitness accounts, the author describes a catalogue of terror, cannibalism, slavery, torture and imprisonment that took place on a massive scale during the great famine in which 10 million people were arrested and sent to death camps while a further 10 million fled their homes. He goes on to explain how the darkest secret of Mao’s rule was kept hidden and why evidence of what happened was disbelieved for so long.
More people died in this catastrophe than in the Second World War or in the concentration camps of Hitler or Stalin.
Here’s how that suffering looks when translated into bland statistics:
Would the ABC also declare that Adolf Hitler’s leadership in Germany had merely “mixed results”?
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Gore wrong yet again
Andrew Bolt
Al Gore goes the big scare in Melbourne:
Former US vice-president Al Gore has told a Melbourne breakfast that climate change is both the most dangerous threat and the greatest opportunity that civilisation has faced…
“It is difficult to ignore that the cyclones are getting stronger, that the fires are getting bigger, that the sea level is rising, that the refugees are beginning to move from places they have long called home.”
Of course, we know that fires are not getting bigger, the sea level has not risen in three years and that a judge has called false Gore’s claim that refugees are fleeing rising seas. Now we know that cyclone energy in Gore’s part of the world (and not just there) is not rising, either:
Why do people still believe the word of a man who repeatedly says things he must or should know are false?
UPDATE
Tim Flannery in 2008:
The water problem is so severe for Adelaide that it may run out of water by early 2009.
Adelaide in 2009:
JULY is Adelaide’s wettest month in four years, with more than 100mm of rain recorded by yesterday.
Adelaide’s dam levels:
69 per cent
At what stage does your record of predictions become so bad that you can be considered a fraud?
===
Chinese regime honored - and emulated
Andrew Bolt
The stifling of a protest is an even better way to honor China’s despotism:
A GROUP of Chinese residents was prevented from speaking at Hurstville Council’s last meeting against its plan to hold a film festival to mark the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China.
The group of 14 stood silently in the public gallery after they were told that the council would not change its procedures to let them speak…
The council and the Chinese Consulate-General are to hold the New China Film Festival from September 25 to October 5. The council has agreed to pay $8400 of ratepayers’ money for the event, including a $5000 VIP cocktail reception for 100 guests…
Outside the meeting, (group spokesman Alfred) Sinn said: “In Australia we can vote, have freedom of belief and live without fear. In China, there is no law under the Chinese Communist Party. That is why we, the ratepayers, do not want to pay $8500 of our money to celebrate 60 years of Chinese communist dictatorship.’’
===
Introduction made
Andrew Bolt
A barrister presents his client to the court:
Mr Higham ... described the facts as unique, involving a working mother ...
Here’s what the job of a working mum can allegedly lead to these days.
===
No more than we’ve wished on ourselves
Andrew Bolt
If we are as racist as we insist, why should we be surprised, or even disappointed that others shy from us?
THE Indian student market is showing early signs of collapse, with the recruitment body IDP Education Australia reporting an 80 per cent fall in appointments by students at its 14 Indian offices..
The Indian market is the sector’s biggest growth area but is under threat amid the fall-out from a spate of assaults on Indian students and revelations that students are being exploited by unscrupulous private colleges and fraudulent agents.
The madness of it is that two of the most high-profile assaults of Indians here were committed by other Indians, but by then we’d too poisoned our reputation for such hair-splitting to count.
UPDATE
Our real problem is a new level of mindless, vindictive violence - Tarantino-style - that many alarmed Australians feel is not punished enough:
A 10-year jail term given to the ringleader of a gang who kicked a man to death for fun has sparked a wave of public anger. The Director of Public Prosecutions is reviewing the sentence given to John Caratozzolo for the murder of Dr Zhongjun Cao.
Whether racism or some other sick motive inspired the member of one cultural minority to kick to death a member of another is not really important. It’s the violence that’s the real issue, and what we do to stamp it out.
UPDATE 2
Even Jill Singer is astonished by the vilification:
Then, of course, we had the Four Corners broadcast this week, essentially a beat-up that led to the Indian media branding Australians a bunch of racists led by an equally shocking and racist Prime Minister.
The report ... showed an undercover journalist exposing a dodgy agent who was selling students fake work experience documents. The reporter was threatened and assaulted two days before the story was broadcast - an incident that was also used to smear our industry’s reputation in India.
Does this really expose us as racist? ... The facts are the agent in question is Indian, the students who pay for the fakes are Indian and the person who assaulted the Indian journalist is also Indian, and threatened her in Hindi.
===
Let them first predict the past
Andrew Bolt
Britain’s Guardian salivates over predictions the world will heat up fast over the next five years:
===
Why spoil a good rumor?
Andrew Bolt
Age reporter Sushi Das now reports on the rumors she plans to later report on if they turn out to be true:
THERE’S a private training college for international students in Melbourne whose chief executive is reputed to be illiterate.... If I can confirm details of the shambolic practices this person is allegedly overseeing, I’ll be blowing the lid on that college...
Once upon a time, reporters didn’t file between getting a tip and checking if it was true.
UPDATE
Another Age reporter files a profile of anti-nuclear hysteric Helen Caldicott for the Business pages that contains lines in the Q&A that should have actually made her back slowly out of the room, never dropping her eyes for a moment from Caldicott’s burning ones:
Biggest achievement?
Helping to end the Cold War
And:
In Australia, she played a big role in forcing the French atmospheric nuclear tests underground, after writing a letter to a newspaper...
===
Once Again, Federal Government Does Not Protect Us
By Bill O'Reilly
Here's the front-page headline in The Wall Street Journal Tuesday: "Traders Blamed for Oil Spike."
The government now admits that greedy speculators artificially drove up the price of oil, hurting all Americans and lighting the fuse for the intense recession. The speculators drove the price of oil from $55 a barrel to $145. Along the way, the oil companies raised their prices to us in concert with that.
There was no supply and demand issue. There was no refining issue. It was all a big con. The government agency overseeing the commodities market allowed it to happen, and then denied it happened, but Tuesday admitted it happened.
You may remember that I was the first broadcast journalist to report this story, back in April 2006:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
O'REILLY: Many of us can expect to pay $3 a gallon for gasoline this summer, thanks to some speculators who are bidding up the price of oil and to the oil companies who love that kind of speculation so they can raise prices accordingly.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Subsequently, I did a number of reports on the oil corruption because it was hurting all of us. I knew it was a bad situation, but I never thought it would ignite a worldwide recession.
You also may remember that just about every financial journalist told me I was nuts. So did most politicians. Now, I'm not gloating. I am proud that for 13 years, "The Factor" has looked out for you and has been right 95 percent of the time.
But the bigger question is the federal government. It simply cannot or will not control corruption. Look, we are all suffering now, partially because billions of dollars were taken out of the economy and put in the pockets of the oil companies and the speculators. That led directly to the economic collapse.
President Bush apparently had no clue. Now President Obama wants the government to run the financial system and the health care industry. In my opinion, that will lead to disaster for this country. Quite simply, the federal government cannot run the economy, health care or assure your personal happiness.
If President Obama continues down the big government road of social engineering, you will see massive, massive corruption. We might also see the USA go into bankruptcy and the dollar crash. Already some speculators are betting against the dollar, which is troubling because all of our savings and earnings are based on a viable American dollar.
The federal government's primary job is to protect us from bad people, whether they are terrorists, corrupt speculators or health care charlatans. This oil speculation deal should be an enormous wake-up call for all of us.
===
RMMB's birthday today. I still remember that first one. Many happy returns.
===
2Day ask rape victim for sex confession
2DayFM breakfast crew The Kyle and Jackie O show were left red-faced today after a lie-detector quiz about a 14-year-old’s drug and sex habits revealed that she was raped at age 12. - My mother did something similar, but far worse than this. It wasn't until I met God that I could forgive her. But she still doesn't get what she did was wrong. It was appalling to have talkback callers supporting Kyle for his 'bravery.' That such things happen is a condemnation of the silence with which I had to work in. Perhaps it would have been better if I told the world, so that others may learn from the lesson. - ed.
Lin family plead for info about murders
Devastated relatives of the murdered Lin family have made an emotional public plea for information, saying the smallest clue could help solve the gruesome killings.
Bodies found, may be missing Koreans
Police have discovered two bodies which could belong to the Korean backpackers, missing for six days in the Griffith area.
Deadlier than Black Saturday: Vics told
Victorians have been warned that the upcoming fire season could be worse than the deadly Black Saturday bushfires which left 173 people dead in their wake.
Mentally ill man held by police, dies
A large, struggling, mentally ill man died of a heart condition after he was handcuffed by police......
Stripper accused of bucks' night rape
A bucks night reveller was completely naked and on his hands and knees when he allegedly was raped......
Bomb threat clears CBD Building
Police insist a bomb threat that caused the evacuation of an entire CBD building was necessary....
People smuggler faces trial after deaths
An Indonesian man accused of a mass people smuggling operation is facing trial for allegedly......
Lost Brisbane dog found in Melbourne nine years later
A FLEA-bitten dog rescued from a squalid Melbourne backyard is to be reunited with her overjoyed Brisbane owner - nine years after she disappeared. And 17-year-old Chloe Rushby, who was only eight when her best mate disappeared, can't wait to have Muffy back in her arms.
Two speed cameras net $7 million in a year
STATE'S nastiest speed trap has caught out 71,288 motorists and raised millions for Government.
Big Macs to be sold at children's hospital
FAST food giant forced to overhaul hospital menu, but Big Macs, chips and soft drink remain. - good -ed.
=== Journalists Corner ===
Note: ON THE RECORD at 10pm
Tonight -- ON THE RECORD at 10pm - we have a special guest California Governor Schwarzenegger. As you know, California, like all of the states, has fallen on hard times but perhaps harder times than most states. Governor Schwarzenegger just signed a new budget and while you may think it has nothing to do with you, it does. California has the 8th largest economy in the world -- and your state trades with California. And guess what? The Governor has to make the same decisions your governor does: how do you decide what to cut? We asked him and he told us how he makes those decisions. Does he wish he could run for President? Who does he admire in the Republican party? He answers those questions and so much more...so don't miss this rare occasion to hear from the Governor of California!
===
Arnold's locked & loaded in a fight for California!
So how does he dig out of debt, put a dent in unemployment and deal with the democrats' tax and spend policies?
The governor lets loose!
===
Guest: Governor Jindal
Will government-run healthcare rob Americans of their insurance? Bobby Jindal reacts!
===
Handcuffing Police?
Did Obama's comments about Cambridge cops hurt American law enforcement?
===
Fed-Up!
Why some states say the Government has overstepped its bounds and how they're fighting back!
=== Comments ===
INSULATION NATION
Tim Blair
Do not fear the cleanliness of tomorrow, advises Kevin Rudd:
‘‘The climate change sceptics constantly scaremonger about the possible loss of jobs through the transition to a lower carbon economy,” he said.
‘‘But they constantly fail to talk about the new clean energy jobs of the future, which will arise from the introduction of the carbon pollution reduction scheme, the renewable energy target and energy efficiency measures in the future.’’
Well, let’s talk about these new clean energy jobs of the future, then. There’s a “10,000-member national Green Jobs Corps”, which will provide six months of training to the long-term unemployed so they can … do what, exactly? And Rudd plans to train 4000 insulation installers, which should take about one minute for each of them:
And don’t forget the “6000 jobs from environmental sustainability programs in priority local economies”. I have no idea what this means.
===
SMALL CHANGE
Tim Blair
He’s a serious guy:
Three months ago, President Barack Obama ordered his cabinet secretaries to find $100 million in budget cuts for the current fiscal year to emphasize the point that he, too, was serious about belt-tightening.
Bravo!
They responded with $102 million.
Hooray!
That is 0.006% of the estimated federal deficit.
===
VILE KYLE
Tim Blair
Michelle Cazzulino mops the floor with Kyle Sandilands and giggling Kyle enabler Jackie O. Sandilands’ weak response to the controversy:
To tell you the truth I was floundering around, signalling to the producers and Jackie – down the camera – indicating that we had to get it off air.It sounds as though Sandilands is pleading … inexperience. When you put a 14-year-old girl in a situation where she’s being asked if she’s had sex, you deserve all the trouble you get.
I didn’t realise I had said “Have you had any other experiences?” …
As for what I said, it wasn’t intended to hurt. If people have found it appalling or offensive I’m sorry for them that feel that way, but I would ask people to put themselves into the situation where someone says to you during a live radio show that they have been raped.
===
FRIES WITH THAT?
Tim Blair
Academics acadoomed:
Melbourne University will slash 220 full-time academic and administrative staff because its financial position has taken a battering in the economic crisis.
But not quite the battering suffered elsewhere:
Only a year ago, Harvard had a $36.9 billion endowment, the largest in academia. Now that endowment has imploded, and the university faces the worst financial crisis in its 373-year history. Could the same lethal mix of uncurbed expansion, colossal debt, arrogance, and mismanagement that ravaged Wall Street bring down America’s most famous university?
And people thought this economic disaster was a bad thing …
===
DAUGHTER PROTECTION CRIMINALISED
Tim Blair
New justice in New Zealand:
A Blenheim father has been convicted and fined $1000 for assaulting a man who wanted to have sex with his 13-year-old daughter.
Read on. The father only beat up the guy after first approaching police ("they said they were not able to assist at that stage"), a government youth care agency and a church, all of whom accomplished nothing. Finally, the 23-year-old lecher (who is referred to throughout the linked report as “the victim") wore a few Dad-delivered punches.
And the girl’s father gets fined $1000.
===
Labor’s pay to play
Andrew Bolt
What else will Labor sell them?
AT 8am today, the Labor Party will sweep aside a velvet rope at the Sydney Convention Centre and beckon in an exclusive coterie of ticket holders.
Together, these 100 business leaders paying $7500 each will pour almost $1 million into ALP coffers in exchange for some face time with government ministers on the sidelines of the party’s national conference.
The ALP’s cash-for-access program could provide a real-time case study for the Crime and Misconduct Commission as it looks into this pay-per-view style of political fundraising.
===
Give those sacked workers a few green collars
Andrew Bolt
Never mind the thousands of jobs Kevin Rudd will kill in mining and manufacturing with his insane mega-taxing emissions trading scheme. He’s announced at the Labor conference today that he’ll make up the loss - well, some of it:
The climate change sceptics constantly scaremonger about the possible loss of jobs through the transition to a lower carbon economy. But they constantly fail to talk about the new clean energy jobs of the future which will arise from the introduction of the carbon pollution reduction scheme, the renewable energy target and energy efficiency measures in the future.
So what are those jobs, and how much will they earn us?
Um, well, first of all they’ll actually cost us money instead:
PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd has unveiled a $100 million plan to create 50,000 green jobs and training opportunities.
Hmm. That’s not a promising start. But, OK, maybe these “green jobs” will still turn out to be real jobs, after a while, involving the making of real things, right?
Wrong:
The plan will consist of the creation of a 10,000-member national Green Jobs Corps, where long-term young jobless will take part in six months of training and work experience.
So not real jobs, then, but just a bit of training for the jobless. So what else has Rudd got?
Labor plans that 30,000 apprentices will be trained with green skills, while there will be an additional 4,000 training places for insulation installers.
So apprentices will get some “green skills”, whatever they are, but not the extra green jobs to go with them - so this promise doesn’t count, either. But, yes, there may indeed be 4000 more training places for roofing insulation installers - who need a day or so of instruction on how to lay the free pink batts the government will hand out for a short while. But still there’s no long-term, real jobs in this $100 million Rudd is now promising.
Anything else?
There will also be another 6,000 jobs from environmental sustainability programs in priority local economies.
Huh? What exactly are these jobs, and why do they sound like ones that will actually cost taxpayers, not earn their own way?
So let’s rewrite Rudd’s promise to remove the spin and deceit:
PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd has unveiled a $100 million plan to create 6000 green jobs, mostly needing future taxpayer support, plus a little green training.
And this is supposed to offset the effects of his job-killing ETS, like this one:
The CPRS scheme will shed 23,510 jobs in the minerals sector by 2020 and more than 66,000 by 2030. These are direct jobs. All minerals sectors will be affected… No state, or the Northern Territory, will be spared… :
And this, as estimated by the Energy Supply Association:
However, even with a 5 per cent reduction in 2000 level emissions at 2020, a number of power stations will need to close while others will need to substantially reduce their production to meet this target.
Think Rudd’s “green jobs” will balance that kind of economic devastation?
===
But he did speak so very well
Andrew Bolt
And still Obama’s ratings fall.
Moral: you may elect a symbol, but you must live with his performance.
===
30 million died, but on the other hand…
Andrew Bolt
Karon Snowdon, reporting for the ABC’s Rear Vision, presents a potted history of China:
Influenced by the Soviet model, collectivisation and social reforms followed. While Mao’s Great Leap Forward was meant to catapult China into the big league of heavy industry, it had mixed results.
“Mixed results”? Is that the ABC’s shorthand for the brutal imposition of the mad whims of a Communist psychopath which lead to the deaths of millions? Jasper Becker’s book on this obscentity puts it rather better:
In 1984 American demographers uncovered evidence that at least 30 million people had starved to death in China between 1958 and 1962.... Based on hundreds of interviews and unpublished documents, (Becker’s book) describes how Mao Zedong created a man-made famine throughout China. Mao’s Great Leap Forward was the greatest example of Utopian engineering ever attempted. Instead, even in the richest regions, peasants died in their millions while the rest became gaunt skeletons. Through graphic eyewitness accounts, the author describes a catalogue of terror, cannibalism, slavery, torture and imprisonment that took place on a massive scale during the great famine in which 10 million people were arrested and sent to death camps while a further 10 million fled their homes. He goes on to explain how the darkest secret of Mao’s rule was kept hidden and why evidence of what happened was disbelieved for so long.
More people died in this catastrophe than in the Second World War or in the concentration camps of Hitler or Stalin.
Here’s how that suffering looks when translated into bland statistics:
Would the ABC also declare that Adolf Hitler’s leadership in Germany had merely “mixed results”?
===
Gore wrong yet again
Andrew Bolt
Al Gore goes the big scare in Melbourne:
Former US vice-president Al Gore has told a Melbourne breakfast that climate change is both the most dangerous threat and the greatest opportunity that civilisation has faced…
“It is difficult to ignore that the cyclones are getting stronger, that the fires are getting bigger, that the sea level is rising, that the refugees are beginning to move from places they have long called home.”
Of course, we know that fires are not getting bigger, the sea level has not risen in three years and that a judge has called false Gore’s claim that refugees are fleeing rising seas. Now we know that cyclone energy in Gore’s part of the world (and not just there) is not rising, either:
Why do people still believe the word of a man who repeatedly says things he must or should know are false?
UPDATE
Tim Flannery in 2008:
The water problem is so severe for Adelaide that it may run out of water by early 2009.
Adelaide in 2009:
JULY is Adelaide’s wettest month in four years, with more than 100mm of rain recorded by yesterday.
Adelaide’s dam levels:
69 per cent
At what stage does your record of predictions become so bad that you can be considered a fraud?
===
Chinese regime honored - and emulated
Andrew Bolt
The stifling of a protest is an even better way to honor China’s despotism:
A GROUP of Chinese residents was prevented from speaking at Hurstville Council’s last meeting against its plan to hold a film festival to mark the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China.
The group of 14 stood silently in the public gallery after they were told that the council would not change its procedures to let them speak…
The council and the Chinese Consulate-General are to hold the New China Film Festival from September 25 to October 5. The council has agreed to pay $8400 of ratepayers’ money for the event, including a $5000 VIP cocktail reception for 100 guests…
Outside the meeting, (group spokesman Alfred) Sinn said: “In Australia we can vote, have freedom of belief and live without fear. In China, there is no law under the Chinese Communist Party. That is why we, the ratepayers, do not want to pay $8500 of our money to celebrate 60 years of Chinese communist dictatorship.’’
===
Introduction made
Andrew Bolt
A barrister presents his client to the court:
Mr Higham ... described the facts as unique, involving a working mother ...
Here’s what the job of a working mum can allegedly lead to these days.
===
No more than we’ve wished on ourselves
Andrew Bolt
If we are as racist as we insist, why should we be surprised, or even disappointed that others shy from us?
THE Indian student market is showing early signs of collapse, with the recruitment body IDP Education Australia reporting an 80 per cent fall in appointments by students at its 14 Indian offices..
The Indian market is the sector’s biggest growth area but is under threat amid the fall-out from a spate of assaults on Indian students and revelations that students are being exploited by unscrupulous private colleges and fraudulent agents.
The madness of it is that two of the most high-profile assaults of Indians here were committed by other Indians, but by then we’d too poisoned our reputation for such hair-splitting to count.
UPDATE
Our real problem is a new level of mindless, vindictive violence - Tarantino-style - that many alarmed Australians feel is not punished enough:
A 10-year jail term given to the ringleader of a gang who kicked a man to death for fun has sparked a wave of public anger. The Director of Public Prosecutions is reviewing the sentence given to John Caratozzolo for the murder of Dr Zhongjun Cao.
Whether racism or some other sick motive inspired the member of one cultural minority to kick to death a member of another is not really important. It’s the violence that’s the real issue, and what we do to stamp it out.
UPDATE 2
Even Jill Singer is astonished by the vilification:
Then, of course, we had the Four Corners broadcast this week, essentially a beat-up that led to the Indian media branding Australians a bunch of racists led by an equally shocking and racist Prime Minister.
The report ... showed an undercover journalist exposing a dodgy agent who was selling students fake work experience documents. The reporter was threatened and assaulted two days before the story was broadcast - an incident that was also used to smear our industry’s reputation in India.
Does this really expose us as racist? ... The facts are the agent in question is Indian, the students who pay for the fakes are Indian and the person who assaulted the Indian journalist is also Indian, and threatened her in Hindi.
===
Let them first predict the past
Andrew Bolt
Britain’s Guardian salivates over predictions the world will heat up fast over the next five years:
New estimate based on the forthcoming upturn in solar activity and El Niño southern oscillation cycles is expected to silence global warming scepticsBut Britain’s Met Office, also warming alarmists, has predicted that kind of overheated thing before, and ... oh dear:
The world faces record-breaking temperatures as the sun’s activity increases, leading the planet to heat up significantly faster than scientists had predicted for the next five years, according to a study.
(T)he Met Office is issuing a revised forecast for more unsettled weather well into the month. It is a far cry from the “barbecue summer” it predicted back in April…Odd, that each time the Met Office has got it wrong, it’s guessed that the summer will be hotter than it turns out. Is there something in its models that biased to warm?
The Met Office also says temperatures have been around or above normal, and that the end of August might be better again… (But) it did indeed stress at the time of the summer forecast in April that the odds of a scorching summer were 65%. It explains that it coined the phrase “barbecue summer” to help journalists’ headlines…
The real problem for the Met Office is that this is the third summer in a row where its forecast has failed. In 2007, the Met Office chirped: “The summer is yet again likely to be warmer than normal. There are no indications of a particularly wet summer.”
We got downpours and floods in the wettest summer for England and Wales since 1912. Temperatures were below average.
In April 2008, the Met Office forecast: “Summer temperatures are likely to be warmer than average and rainfall near or above average.” That did not prepare people for one of the wettest summers on record with high winds and low sunshine…
Chief meteorologist Ewan ... McCallum admitted in a news conference in April that seasonal forecasting was still in its infancy - a cross between climate change prediction and tomorrow’s weather forecast.
===
Why spoil a good rumor?
Andrew Bolt
Age reporter Sushi Das now reports on the rumors she plans to later report on if they turn out to be true:
THERE’S a private training college for international students in Melbourne whose chief executive is reputed to be illiterate.... If I can confirm details of the shambolic practices this person is allegedly overseeing, I’ll be blowing the lid on that college...
Once upon a time, reporters didn’t file between getting a tip and checking if it was true.
UPDATE
Another Age reporter files a profile of anti-nuclear hysteric Helen Caldicott for the Business pages that contains lines in the Q&A that should have actually made her back slowly out of the room, never dropping her eyes for a moment from Caldicott’s burning ones:
Biggest achievement?
Helping to end the Cold War
And:
In Australia, she played a big role in forcing the French atmospheric nuclear tests underground, after writing a letter to a newspaper...
===
Once Again, Federal Government Does Not Protect Us
By Bill O'Reilly
Here's the front-page headline in The Wall Street Journal Tuesday: "Traders Blamed for Oil Spike."
The government now admits that greedy speculators artificially drove up the price of oil, hurting all Americans and lighting the fuse for the intense recession. The speculators drove the price of oil from $55 a barrel to $145. Along the way, the oil companies raised their prices to us in concert with that.
There was no supply and demand issue. There was no refining issue. It was all a big con. The government agency overseeing the commodities market allowed it to happen, and then denied it happened, but Tuesday admitted it happened.
You may remember that I was the first broadcast journalist to report this story, back in April 2006:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
O'REILLY: Many of us can expect to pay $3 a gallon for gasoline this summer, thanks to some speculators who are bidding up the price of oil and to the oil companies who love that kind of speculation so they can raise prices accordingly.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Subsequently, I did a number of reports on the oil corruption because it was hurting all of us. I knew it was a bad situation, but I never thought it would ignite a worldwide recession.
You also may remember that just about every financial journalist told me I was nuts. So did most politicians. Now, I'm not gloating. I am proud that for 13 years, "The Factor" has looked out for you and has been right 95 percent of the time.
But the bigger question is the federal government. It simply cannot or will not control corruption. Look, we are all suffering now, partially because billions of dollars were taken out of the economy and put in the pockets of the oil companies and the speculators. That led directly to the economic collapse.
President Bush apparently had no clue. Now President Obama wants the government to run the financial system and the health care industry. In my opinion, that will lead to disaster for this country. Quite simply, the federal government cannot run the economy, health care or assure your personal happiness.
If President Obama continues down the big government road of social engineering, you will see massive, massive corruption. We might also see the USA go into bankruptcy and the dollar crash. Already some speculators are betting against the dollar, which is troubling because all of our savings and earnings are based on a viable American dollar.
The federal government's primary job is to protect us from bad people, whether they are terrorists, corrupt speculators or health care charlatans. This oil speculation deal should be an enormous wake-up call for all of us.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Claire McCaskill's Office Holds Town Hall-- Tea Party Breaks Out
On Monday July 27 2009 Senator Claire McCaskill's office held a town hall meeting at Forest Park Community College in St. Louis... A Tea Party Protest broke out.
Headlines Wednesday 29th July 2009
2Day ask rape victim for sex confession
2DayFM breakfast crew The Kyle and Jackie O show were left red-faced today after a lie-detector quiz about a 14-year-old’s drug and sex habits revealed that she was raped at age 12
'Curry basher' jailed for murder
A MAN who kicked a university researcher to death for fun while out "curry bashing" gets 15 years.
Robbers kill eight in $4.6m bank heist
GUARDS were undressed, gagged and shot in the back of the head in a suspected inside job to raise money for bombings.
Ambos to wear face masks
All paramedics across New South Wales will now have to wear face masks and goggles when treating patients to stop the spread of swine flu.
Girl wedged between train and platform
A teenage girl is fighting for her life after she became wedged between a platform and a train in an horrific peak-hour accident at a Melbourne railway station.
Kent pleads guilty to terror charge
Melbourne man Shane Kent faces up to 15 years jail after admitting membership of a terrorist group and his involvement in preparing a terrorist act.
Don't shun abuse victims, NT judge warns
A high-ranking Northern Territory judge has warned Aboriginal communities not to threaten victims of abuse or protect the perpetrators.
Dad killed 4yo 'to avoid child support'
A father hurled his daughter off a 36-metre cliff to avoid paying child support, a prosecutor said on Monday during the man's murder retrial.
Lin family plead for info about murders
Devastated relatives of the murdered Lin family have made an emotional public plea for information, saying the smallest clue could help solve the gruesome killings.
Cops nab 12-year-old drug dealer
German police said on Tuesday they had caught a 12-year-old boy in possession of more than 150......
Gnomes find good homes
About 1,500 garden gnomes have been saved from the scrapheap after an 800-kilometre rescue mission.
'I didn't know I married a terrorist'
A woman arrested in connection with the July 17 hotel bombings in Jakarta had no idea her husband......
Doped mum took kids for picnic on road
A mother was so doped up on Valium she took her children into the middle of a busy road for a fast food picnic, a court has heard.
Police shoot cleaver-wielding actor
A New Zealand actor who starred in police training videos has been shot after lunging at officers......
Woman jailed over sex abuse of daughter
A Perth mother who sexually abused her disabled teenage daughter has been jailed along with a male......
Melbourne Uni calls for redundancies as GFC bites
The University of Melbourne, the latest victim of the global financial crisis, is about to shed 220 jobs through a voluntary redundancy program. The job losses, amounting to about three per cent of the university's 7,500 staff, are expected to cost around $15 million. They are among a number of measures designed to save $30 million a year. - So many lefties, so few jobs. - ed.
Girl escapes from van man in Sydney street
A teenage girl has wrenched herself free from a man driving a van who grabbed her in a suburban Sydney street, police say. The 14-year-old girl was walking along Penshurst Street at Beverly Hills in southwest Sydney about 11amtoday when a white van passed by.
=== Journalists Corner ===
Emergency surgery for healthcare reform?
What McCain would cut out and add in to the president's ailing plan!
===
Judgement Day!
Sotomayor faces the Senate! How will her controversial rulings play out this round?
===
Is It Legal?
Fired for marrying an adult actress! Can you be let go based on who you end up with?
===
Pelosi's Promise!
Can she really get the votes to pass the healthcare reform? Greta gets the inside scoop from Washington!
=== Comments ===
WOMEN PUT IN THEIR PLACE
Tim Blair
Britain’s collapse continues:
Women police officers are being issued with headscarves to wear when they visit a mosque.
They are expected to put the scarfs on shortly before they enter the mosque, in keeping with Islamic custom.
Assistant Chief Constable Jackie Roberts looks particularly happy in her new suppression hat. What Britain really needs, of course, is coverings for women’s arms.
===
SPARE CHANGE
Tim Blair
The NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change spent nearly $2 million on petrol to keep its 989 vehicles rolling during the last 12 months.
===
Sack him. And call the police
Andrew Bolt
Please, is there some way of holding not just the mother and the (alleged) rapist to account, but Kyle Sandilands as well?
AUTHORITIES are investigating a radio stunt in which a girl was strapped to a lie detector before revealing she was raped.
The girl, 14, was peppered with questions about whether she had ever had sex before she broke down on the 2Day FM radio station hosted by by Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O, revealing the rape ordeal she endured at the age of 12…
Under pressure from her mother to reveal if she had ever had sex, the girl broke down and revealed she had been raped.
Sandilands’ first response to the horrifying revelation was, “Right, is that the only experience you have had?” The segment briefly continued with the girl’s mother admitting she knew of the rape before Jackie O intervened and shut the segment down.
Vile, vile, vile. If the police aren’t speaking to the mother already, what’s keeping them? As for Sandilands and his sidekick, sack them, ban them, whatever. The station is saying the stunt went wrong, but in what possible way could it have gone right?
And for God’s sake let the authorities get the help to the girl that she so badly needs.
UPDATE
Listen to the audio (first link) to hear just how gross - how utterly barbaric - the segment was even before it went “wrong”. First, the girl’s mother, sounding excited, says she has brought in her daughter for the lie detector test to check if she’s telling the truth about “drugs and sex”. She “might have had sex before”, mum tells the world, and she’s “smoked marijuana”. Already the segment has gone way, way over the line.
But the girl is hooked up to the detector, monitored by a man called Charles. Then this:
Jackie O: All right, we have her hooked up to the lie detector.
Sandilands: Awwww.
Jackie O: She’s not happy! I just saw her listening to that replay.
Sandilands: How are you, Rachel?
Girl: I’m scared. It’s not fair.
Jackie O: It wouldn’t be fair on any kid, I tell you, I sympathise with you
Sandilands: Is that true, Charles, is that true?
Charles: That is true.
Sandilands: She is scared, everyone, yeah.
Jackie O: Yeah. Mum, you have a series of questions you’re going to ask your daughter, and, Rachel, you reply either yes or no and then it will be picked up on the lie detector whether you are telling the truth or lying.
(Rachel is asked whether she’s wagged school. She denies it, and the lie detector registers a lie. The girl protests she’s telling the truth.)
Jackie O: OK, what’s your next question, Mum.
Mother: OK, Have you had sex?
Girl: I’ve already told you the story of this… Don’t look at me and smile because it’s not funny. (Shouts:) Oh, OK … I got raped when I was 12 years old.
(Silence)
Sandilands: Right. (Pause.) And is that the, er, is that the only experience you’ve had?
Mother: I only found out about that a couple of months ago. Yes, I knew about that.
Girl: And yet you still ask me the question.
Mother: I was, the question was, have you had sex, other than that.
Jackie O: Rachel, I’m really sorry, we didn’t actually know that that was the case, and I think we might actually abort this segment, I had no idea that you’ve been through that, so I’m really sorry, and we’ll just let you off the hook, I think, I think it’s best not to continue. Are you all right? It’s okay, you just take a breather, it’s fine. We always have counselling services here, Rachel, if you need that. Have you had any counselling over this issue?
Mother: No, she has not.
===
Aborigines lose their green halo
Andrew Bolt
The Green Savage myth has been so seductive to activists and compassion-advertisers. Take Terry Roberts, then South Australia’s Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and Reconciliation:
All Aboriginal people are environmental ists. They are the original environmentalists.
How popular this reinvention has been, even when the facts were a bit too stubborn:
Lesley Head (1990) and Lee Sackett (1991) have analysed constructions of Aboriginality by conservationists. Both argue that some conservationists have created an image of Aboriginal people as ‘noble environmentalists’, and then used deviation from this image as evidence of corruption:
As they saw it, the people they had backed as original environmentalists turned out to be mere shadows of their ancestors. For the conservationists, it was not a case of the model being wrong; rather the Aborigines themselves were a disappointment.
Hmm. So how much of a disappointment are our “original environmentalists” to today’s more dictatorial ones, given their objection to green-pleasing new laws in Queensland to ban development of their rivers:
But Wilderness Society member Anna Christie was not moved by the Cape York Aborigines’ message.
“I am aware of the dispute between the Aboriginal people and the environmental movement up there particularly, but I have to say environmental sustainability comes first,” she said.
Which turns Aborigines from green pets to green slaves, as Aboriginal protesters rightly point out:
Two giant koalas led a group of Aboriginal people in chains through the entertainment district of Sydney’s Fox Studios.
===
Did the ice freeze Greenpeace’s brain?
Andrew Bolt
And so Greenpeace sent a ship off to the Arctic to protest against the melting ice and the fossil fuels that are to blame. From the ship’s log:
The sea ice is chasing us into the bay of large icebergs.... For the first time in this trip we do some real icebreaking… At first, it is pretty easy going. With 90% power on, we are just able to break through the 50cm ice. Then we have to stop, back up one ship length, and charge at it again. And again. And again.... Icebreaking is time consuming and sucks down tons of fuel.
UPDATE
A short primer from Dr David Evans on why Climate Change Minister Penny Wong still can’t show the world is warming, even though she’s given up on atmosphere temperatures, and told us to check sea temperatures instead. Conclusion:
The climate alarmists had to switch from air temperatures to ocean temperatures because by 2009 too many people are aware that air temperatures have been dropping since 2002 and that the warmest recent year was 1998. This latest position is possibly the last roll of the dice in the alarmist’s grab for political power and results, because if the long term pattern holds then the next decade or two will show cooling.
===
What right to kill churches?
Andrew Bolt
Peter Costello on the bigotry of Victoria’s anti-discrimination police and their censorious masters:
Now, discrimination statutes don’t apply to religious organisations and their schools on the grounds of freedom of religion. So a parliamentary committee has recommended options to extend the power of the state over the province of religion. One proposed change is to restrict the freedom of religious schools to choose their employees on the basis of their religious faith....
Parents who choose to send their children to a Christian school have a reasonable expectation that the child will get a Christian education. How could the school fulfil its obligation to the parents if it is required by law to employ non-Christian or anti-Christian teachers to provide it? If the law demands this you might as well close down the concept of a Christian school - which might be what some of the critics intend.
And worse may be to come:
===
Wiser than Obama
Andrew Bolt
When Barack Obama’s playing of racial politics costs him the votes of black police officers, he’s in real strife.
Very impressive character witnesses for the police officer Obama slimed, by the way.
===
Green power is just cash for unions
Andrew Bolt
Alan Moran works out the price of Kevin Rudd’s plan for more green power:
THE renewable energy bill now before the Senate proposes that 20 per cent of electricity be derived from renewable sources.
This would offer no advantage to Australia while crippling the competitiveness of our energy supply. Based on the cost premium required for wind, the least uncompetitive available renewable source, and the bill’s penalty costs on electricity retailers, the proposal requires energy at double the cost of commercial sources.
On average this would raise the average cost of generated electricity by 10 per cent and impose a deadweight loss on the economy of $1.8 billion per year.
And this is even before the price of Rudd’s colossal emissions trading scheme is included.
So who is Labor actually helping to make rich by this new law, and the fat premiums it’s forcing consumers to pay for no gain at all?
Pacific Hydro… is investing $2 billion in wind power in Australia, and has 98 of the 116 generators now operating in Victoria. The company is owned by a funds manager that in turn is owned by 40 industry superannuation funds such as Cbus, TWUSuper and AustralianSuper. Half the boards of these funds are typically union officials, picked by the ACTU and industry unions.
UPDATE
Resources Minister Martin Ferguson admits:
Every four months, from now until 2020, China will build new coal-fired power stations possessing the same capacity as Australia’s entire coal-fired power sector.
Terry McCrann does the sums:
We can close down what is to all practical intents and purposes our entire power industry - give or take a few dams in Tasmania and thousands of all-but useless wind turbines - and the emissions ‘saved’ would be spent in China in four months…
Give or take one or two ‘Australian industries’, depending on how things play out in practice, it will build 25-35 Australian coal-fired power industries by the 2020 that is promoted as the interim date for substantial reductions in global carbon dioxide emissions.
Of course, we should praise Ferguson for his honesty in demonstrating so clearly how useless are green plans to… er… Well, McCrann tries to finish Ferguson’s article for him:
===
Rudd’s intellectual rort
Andrew Bolt
Paul Kelly has little confidence in Kevin Rudd’s intellectual honesty:
What is the lesson for Australia from the present crisis?
Rudd has written two essays on this subject. In the first he attributed the crisis to unrestrained free markets and neo-liberalism and called for a new epoch based on social democratic capitalism. This is a popular Labor Party position.
Its problem is that there was no such era of neo-liberalism in Australia. Rudd’s economic advisers know this. Treasury deputy secretary David Gruen was honest enough in his recent Sydney Institute speech to say: “Certainly I cannot recall any time over the past several years when an Australian policy-maker has extolled the virtues of leaving the financial system largely to regulate itself.” Not one. Yet this was Rudd’s precise definition of neo-liberalism…
In Rudd’s second essay last weekend he focused on the recovery and offered the paradigm of “the building decade” as the overarching political theme… But can Rudd be serious in arguing that nation building is the main policy lesson from this event? Rudd boosts this idea from schools to national broadband but the ongoing financial foundations for such nation building will be limited and must be tied to financial rates of return to avoid large-scale rorts…
In his second essay, Rudd rightly focuses on the need to withdraw the stimulus over time, retire debt and look to productivity.... (T)he return-to-surplus pledge dictates what Rudd calls “unpopular decisions” as federal spending is kept to 2 per cent in real terms for many years.
Last week Access Economics described the task in these terms: “...You may be surprised to know that, after 4 1/2 years, the cumulative impact of the 2 per cent real rule will be devastating. It would, for example, be the equivalent cost savings from abolishing the Defence Department, or it would be the equivalent of the savings the government would make from lifting the age pension not to 67 but to 107.” ...
UPDATE
Ross Gittins is falling out of love:
In the short time he’s been in office, Rudd has established a record of over-promising and under-delivering.
One of his greatest weaknesses is an inability to set priorities. He has a thousand things he wants to do and problems he wants to fix, and while he’s focused on fixing something, it’s his top priority. He invariably claims the fix he cobbled together is the biggest and best in ages. But then he moves on and something else becomes top priority.
===
The workers, united…
Andrew Bolt
If they do this to each other, heaven knows what they’ll do to a poor boss:
Police were called to the headquarters of the Health Services Union No. 1 branch after a tussle involving the national secretary, Kathy Jackson, and her arch enemy, state president Pauline Fegan. Last night Ms Jackson obtained an interim intervention order against Ms Fegan, saying she now feared for her safety and would press charges.
Ms Fegan in turn accused Ms Jackson of starting the fight and wrote to the union’s national executive, calling on it to immediately stand down the national secretary for ‘‘abusing and assaulting members’’....
Ms Jackson told the Melbourne Magistrates Court that when the tug of war started, the two officials yelled out for Ms Fegan to help.
‘‘The scuffle then went to the bottom of the stairs where from behind [Ms Fegan] grabbed me in a headlock and broke my necklace,’’ she said. ‘‘I have bruises and marks ...”
===
Battle of the buses
Andrew Bolt
Perth produces another measure of a growing barbarity:
Attacks on buses have soared from 856 to 1379 in the past two years.
I really don’t think the same old Kumbayah is the answer:
``The most important thing to do is engage the youths in effective treatment programs based on restorative justice,’’ Dr Indermaur said.
===
India takes us at our racist word
Andrew Bolt
The Rudd Government is rightly furious:
News channel Times Now broadcast a program on Monday about the treatment of Indian students in Australia. It was called ‘‘Yes, It’s Racism’’ and was followed by a website feature yesterday titled ‘‘Take this, Mr Rudd’’…
On Monday, the ABC’s Four Corners program revealed an Indian journalist who was working undercover on this issue had been attacked. The reporter said the attacker appeared to be Indian, but that detail had scarcely been reported in the Indian media.
The victim is astonished:
“I’m just very, very appalled with the Indian media assuming that this was a racist attack,” said the reporter, a 28-year-old long-time resident of Australia who covertly exposed migration scams for ABC TV’s Four Corners. “It was absolutely not. My attacker looked like an Indian person and I was threatened in Hindi.”
Appalling, yes, and dishonest. But why attack Indian media for doing what we do ourselves?
After all, it was Kevin Rudd who formally apologised for stealing Aboriginal children for racist reasons, when no one can find even 10 such victims. It was the Howard and Rudd Governments which gave Baz Lurhmann $80 million to help make and promote Australia, a film which claimed we stole Aboriginal children and sent them to face Japanese troops, when in fact we rescued and evacuated them. It was again government bureaucrats which helped finance, distribute and show in schools the film Rabbit Proof Fence, a “true story” about our stealing of Aboriginal children that was in fact false - and hypocrital. And now we have the Eddie McGuires, Fiona Stanleys and the like who see racism where, if anything, the evidence suggests the opposite of what they claim.
If we’re angry at Indian media for lying about our racism, know this: they do nothing that we don’t do to ourselves.
===
Labor’s state of mate’s rates
Andrew Bolt
It sounds over-the-top, yet Tony Fitzgerald has seen this closer up than most:
QUEENSLAND’S pre-eminent corruption reformer Tony Fitzgerald QC broke two decades of silence to warn last night that the state was sliding back to its “dark past”, in a speech that savaged deals between so-called Labor mates, business and government.
Mr Fitzgerald reserved his harshest criticism for former Queensland premier Peter Beattie, now ensconced in a $490,000-a-year position as the state’s Los Angeles-based trade commissioner, suggesting that Mr Beattie’s election in 1998 had been the trigger for him to move to NSW.
Speaking for the first time on the reform process since he delivered his ground-breaking report on police and political corruption in July 1989, Mr Fitzgerald blasted the “ethics” of the current and former Labor governments. Secrecy was re-established by “sham claims” under which documents sought through Freedom of Information provisions were placed off limits by being run through cabinet.
“Access can now be purchased, patronage is dispensed, mates and supporters are appointed and retired politicians exploit their connections to obtain ‘success fees’ for deals between business and government,” Mr Fitzgerald said in an address at Brisbane’s Griffith University before the inaugural Tony Fitzgerald lecture.
Whether you think that goes too far, even after the jailing this month of former Beattie Minister Gordon Nuttall for corruption, Bligh is surely right to review this very dodgy practice:
===
What, no bicycles?
Andrew Bolt
From NSW:
Of the Department of Environment and Climate Change’s 989 vehicles, only 38 are hybrid Toyota Priuses.
===
She’s Aboriginal
Andrew Bolt
How bracing to hear Olga Havnen, co-ordinator of the Combined Aboriginal Organisations of the Northern Territory, complain last night’s on SBS’s wildly skewed Liberal Rule that wicked John Howard had forced Aboriginal people (like her) to join mainstream society.
2DayFM breakfast crew The Kyle and Jackie O show were left red-faced today after a lie-detector quiz about a 14-year-old’s drug and sex habits revealed that she was raped at age 12
'Curry basher' jailed for murder
A MAN who kicked a university researcher to death for fun while out "curry bashing" gets 15 years.
Robbers kill eight in $4.6m bank heist
GUARDS were undressed, gagged and shot in the back of the head in a suspected inside job to raise money for bombings.
Ambos to wear face masks
All paramedics across New South Wales will now have to wear face masks and goggles when treating patients to stop the spread of swine flu.
Girl wedged between train and platform
A teenage girl is fighting for her life after she became wedged between a platform and a train in an horrific peak-hour accident at a Melbourne railway station.
Kent pleads guilty to terror charge
Melbourne man Shane Kent faces up to 15 years jail after admitting membership of a terrorist group and his involvement in preparing a terrorist act.
Don't shun abuse victims, NT judge warns
A high-ranking Northern Territory judge has warned Aboriginal communities not to threaten victims of abuse or protect the perpetrators.
Dad killed 4yo 'to avoid child support'
A father hurled his daughter off a 36-metre cliff to avoid paying child support, a prosecutor said on Monday during the man's murder retrial.
Lin family plead for info about murders
Devastated relatives of the murdered Lin family have made an emotional public plea for information, saying the smallest clue could help solve the gruesome killings.
Cops nab 12-year-old drug dealer
German police said on Tuesday they had caught a 12-year-old boy in possession of more than 150......
Gnomes find good homes
About 1,500 garden gnomes have been saved from the scrapheap after an 800-kilometre rescue mission.
'I didn't know I married a terrorist'
A woman arrested in connection with the July 17 hotel bombings in Jakarta had no idea her husband......
Doped mum took kids for picnic on road
A mother was so doped up on Valium she took her children into the middle of a busy road for a fast food picnic, a court has heard.
Police shoot cleaver-wielding actor
A New Zealand actor who starred in police training videos has been shot after lunging at officers......
Woman jailed over sex abuse of daughter
A Perth mother who sexually abused her disabled teenage daughter has been jailed along with a male......
Melbourne Uni calls for redundancies as GFC bites
The University of Melbourne, the latest victim of the global financial crisis, is about to shed 220 jobs through a voluntary redundancy program. The job losses, amounting to about three per cent of the university's 7,500 staff, are expected to cost around $15 million. They are among a number of measures designed to save $30 million a year. - So many lefties, so few jobs. - ed.
Girl escapes from van man in Sydney street
A teenage girl has wrenched herself free from a man driving a van who grabbed her in a suburban Sydney street, police say. The 14-year-old girl was walking along Penshurst Street at Beverly Hills in southwest Sydney about 11amtoday when a white van passed by.
=== Journalists Corner ===
Emergency surgery for healthcare reform?
What McCain would cut out and add in to the president's ailing plan!
===
Judgement Day!
Sotomayor faces the Senate! How will her controversial rulings play out this round?
===
Is It Legal?
Fired for marrying an adult actress! Can you be let go based on who you end up with?
===
Pelosi's Promise!
Can she really get the votes to pass the healthcare reform? Greta gets the inside scoop from Washington!
=== Comments ===
WOMEN PUT IN THEIR PLACE
Tim Blair
Britain’s collapse continues:
Women police officers are being issued with headscarves to wear when they visit a mosque.
They are expected to put the scarfs on shortly before they enter the mosque, in keeping with Islamic custom.
Assistant Chief Constable Jackie Roberts looks particularly happy in her new suppression hat. What Britain really needs, of course, is coverings for women’s arms.
===
SPARE CHANGE
Tim Blair
The NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change spent nearly $2 million on petrol to keep its 989 vehicles rolling during the last 12 months.
===
Sack him. And call the police
Andrew Bolt
Please, is there some way of holding not just the mother and the (alleged) rapist to account, but Kyle Sandilands as well?
AUTHORITIES are investigating a radio stunt in which a girl was strapped to a lie detector before revealing she was raped.
The girl, 14, was peppered with questions about whether she had ever had sex before she broke down on the 2Day FM radio station hosted by by Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O, revealing the rape ordeal she endured at the age of 12…
Under pressure from her mother to reveal if she had ever had sex, the girl broke down and revealed she had been raped.
Sandilands’ first response to the horrifying revelation was, “Right, is that the only experience you have had?” The segment briefly continued with the girl’s mother admitting she knew of the rape before Jackie O intervened and shut the segment down.
Vile, vile, vile. If the police aren’t speaking to the mother already, what’s keeping them? As for Sandilands and his sidekick, sack them, ban them, whatever. The station is saying the stunt went wrong, but in what possible way could it have gone right?
And for God’s sake let the authorities get the help to the girl that she so badly needs.
UPDATE
Listen to the audio (first link) to hear just how gross - how utterly barbaric - the segment was even before it went “wrong”. First, the girl’s mother, sounding excited, says she has brought in her daughter for the lie detector test to check if she’s telling the truth about “drugs and sex”. She “might have had sex before”, mum tells the world, and she’s “smoked marijuana”. Already the segment has gone way, way over the line.
But the girl is hooked up to the detector, monitored by a man called Charles. Then this:
Jackie O: All right, we have her hooked up to the lie detector.
Sandilands: Awwww.
Jackie O: She’s not happy! I just saw her listening to that replay.
Sandilands: How are you, Rachel?
Girl: I’m scared. It’s not fair.
Jackie O: It wouldn’t be fair on any kid, I tell you, I sympathise with you
Sandilands: Is that true, Charles, is that true?
Charles: That is true.
Sandilands: She is scared, everyone, yeah.
Jackie O: Yeah. Mum, you have a series of questions you’re going to ask your daughter, and, Rachel, you reply either yes or no and then it will be picked up on the lie detector whether you are telling the truth or lying.
(Rachel is asked whether she’s wagged school. She denies it, and the lie detector registers a lie. The girl protests she’s telling the truth.)
Jackie O: OK, what’s your next question, Mum.
Mother: OK, Have you had sex?
Girl: I’ve already told you the story of this… Don’t look at me and smile because it’s not funny. (Shouts:) Oh, OK … I got raped when I was 12 years old.
(Silence)
Sandilands: Right. (Pause.) And is that the, er, is that the only experience you’ve had?
Mother: I only found out about that a couple of months ago. Yes, I knew about that.
Girl: And yet you still ask me the question.
Mother: I was, the question was, have you had sex, other than that.
Jackie O: Rachel, I’m really sorry, we didn’t actually know that that was the case, and I think we might actually abort this segment, I had no idea that you’ve been through that, so I’m really sorry, and we’ll just let you off the hook, I think, I think it’s best not to continue. Are you all right? It’s okay, you just take a breather, it’s fine. We always have counselling services here, Rachel, if you need that. Have you had any counselling over this issue?
Mother: No, she has not.
===
Aborigines lose their green halo
Andrew Bolt
The Green Savage myth has been so seductive to activists and compassion-advertisers. Take Terry Roberts, then South Australia’s Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and Reconciliation:
All Aboriginal people are environmental ists. They are the original environmentalists.
How popular this reinvention has been, even when the facts were a bit too stubborn:
Lesley Head (1990) and Lee Sackett (1991) have analysed constructions of Aboriginality by conservationists. Both argue that some conservationists have created an image of Aboriginal people as ‘noble environmentalists’, and then used deviation from this image as evidence of corruption:
As they saw it, the people they had backed as original environmentalists turned out to be mere shadows of their ancestors. For the conservationists, it was not a case of the model being wrong; rather the Aborigines themselves were a disappointment.
Hmm. So how much of a disappointment are our “original environmentalists” to today’s more dictatorial ones, given their objection to green-pleasing new laws in Queensland to ban development of their rivers:
But Wilderness Society member Anna Christie was not moved by the Cape York Aborigines’ message.
“I am aware of the dispute between the Aboriginal people and the environmental movement up there particularly, but I have to say environmental sustainability comes first,” she said.
Which turns Aborigines from green pets to green slaves, as Aboriginal protesters rightly point out:
Two giant koalas led a group of Aboriginal people in chains through the entertainment district of Sydney’s Fox Studios.
===
Did the ice freeze Greenpeace’s brain?
Andrew Bolt
And so Greenpeace sent a ship off to the Arctic to protest against the melting ice and the fossil fuels that are to blame. From the ship’s log:
The sea ice is chasing us into the bay of large icebergs.... For the first time in this trip we do some real icebreaking… At first, it is pretty easy going. With 90% power on, we are just able to break through the 50cm ice. Then we have to stop, back up one ship length, and charge at it again. And again. And again.... Icebreaking is time consuming and sucks down tons of fuel.
UPDATE
A short primer from Dr David Evans on why Climate Change Minister Penny Wong still can’t show the world is warming, even though she’s given up on atmosphere temperatures, and told us to check sea temperatures instead. Conclusion:
The climate alarmists had to switch from air temperatures to ocean temperatures because by 2009 too many people are aware that air temperatures have been dropping since 2002 and that the warmest recent year was 1998. This latest position is possibly the last roll of the dice in the alarmist’s grab for political power and results, because if the long term pattern holds then the next decade or two will show cooling.
===
What right to kill churches?
Andrew Bolt
Peter Costello on the bigotry of Victoria’s anti-discrimination police and their censorious masters:
Now, discrimination statutes don’t apply to religious organisations and their schools on the grounds of freedom of religion. So a parliamentary committee has recommended options to extend the power of the state over the province of religion. One proposed change is to restrict the freedom of religious schools to choose their employees on the basis of their religious faith....
Parents who choose to send their children to a Christian school have a reasonable expectation that the child will get a Christian education. How could the school fulfil its obligation to the parents if it is required by law to employ non-Christian or anti-Christian teachers to provide it? If the law demands this you might as well close down the concept of a Christian school - which might be what some of the critics intend.
And worse may be to come:
===
Wiser than Obama
Andrew Bolt
When Barack Obama’s playing of racial politics costs him the votes of black police officers, he’s in real strife.
Very impressive character witnesses for the police officer Obama slimed, by the way.
===
Green power is just cash for unions
Andrew Bolt
Alan Moran works out the price of Kevin Rudd’s plan for more green power:
THE renewable energy bill now before the Senate proposes that 20 per cent of electricity be derived from renewable sources.
This would offer no advantage to Australia while crippling the competitiveness of our energy supply. Based on the cost premium required for wind, the least uncompetitive available renewable source, and the bill’s penalty costs on electricity retailers, the proposal requires energy at double the cost of commercial sources.
On average this would raise the average cost of generated electricity by 10 per cent and impose a deadweight loss on the economy of $1.8 billion per year.
And this is even before the price of Rudd’s colossal emissions trading scheme is included.
So who is Labor actually helping to make rich by this new law, and the fat premiums it’s forcing consumers to pay for no gain at all?
Pacific Hydro… is investing $2 billion in wind power in Australia, and has 98 of the 116 generators now operating in Victoria. The company is owned by a funds manager that in turn is owned by 40 industry superannuation funds such as Cbus, TWUSuper and AustralianSuper. Half the boards of these funds are typically union officials, picked by the ACTU and industry unions.
UPDATE
Resources Minister Martin Ferguson admits:
Every four months, from now until 2020, China will build new coal-fired power stations possessing the same capacity as Australia’s entire coal-fired power sector.
Terry McCrann does the sums:
We can close down what is to all practical intents and purposes our entire power industry - give or take a few dams in Tasmania and thousands of all-but useless wind turbines - and the emissions ‘saved’ would be spent in China in four months…
Give or take one or two ‘Australian industries’, depending on how things play out in practice, it will build 25-35 Australian coal-fired power industries by the 2020 that is promoted as the interim date for substantial reductions in global carbon dioxide emissions.
Of course, we should praise Ferguson for his honesty in demonstrating so clearly how useless are green plans to… er… Well, McCrann tries to finish Ferguson’s article for him:
===
Rudd’s intellectual rort
Andrew Bolt
Paul Kelly has little confidence in Kevin Rudd’s intellectual honesty:
What is the lesson for Australia from the present crisis?
Rudd has written two essays on this subject. In the first he attributed the crisis to unrestrained free markets and neo-liberalism and called for a new epoch based on social democratic capitalism. This is a popular Labor Party position.
Its problem is that there was no such era of neo-liberalism in Australia. Rudd’s economic advisers know this. Treasury deputy secretary David Gruen was honest enough in his recent Sydney Institute speech to say: “Certainly I cannot recall any time over the past several years when an Australian policy-maker has extolled the virtues of leaving the financial system largely to regulate itself.” Not one. Yet this was Rudd’s precise definition of neo-liberalism…
In Rudd’s second essay last weekend he focused on the recovery and offered the paradigm of “the building decade” as the overarching political theme… But can Rudd be serious in arguing that nation building is the main policy lesson from this event? Rudd boosts this idea from schools to national broadband but the ongoing financial foundations for such nation building will be limited and must be tied to financial rates of return to avoid large-scale rorts…
In his second essay, Rudd rightly focuses on the need to withdraw the stimulus over time, retire debt and look to productivity.... (T)he return-to-surplus pledge dictates what Rudd calls “unpopular decisions” as federal spending is kept to 2 per cent in real terms for many years.
Last week Access Economics described the task in these terms: “...You may be surprised to know that, after 4 1/2 years, the cumulative impact of the 2 per cent real rule will be devastating. It would, for example, be the equivalent cost savings from abolishing the Defence Department, or it would be the equivalent of the savings the government would make from lifting the age pension not to 67 but to 107.” ...
UPDATE
Ross Gittins is falling out of love:
In the short time he’s been in office, Rudd has established a record of over-promising and under-delivering.
One of his greatest weaknesses is an inability to set priorities. He has a thousand things he wants to do and problems he wants to fix, and while he’s focused on fixing something, it’s his top priority. He invariably claims the fix he cobbled together is the biggest and best in ages. But then he moves on and something else becomes top priority.
===
The workers, united…
Andrew Bolt
If they do this to each other, heaven knows what they’ll do to a poor boss:
Police were called to the headquarters of the Health Services Union No. 1 branch after a tussle involving the national secretary, Kathy Jackson, and her arch enemy, state president Pauline Fegan. Last night Ms Jackson obtained an interim intervention order against Ms Fegan, saying she now feared for her safety and would press charges.
Ms Fegan in turn accused Ms Jackson of starting the fight and wrote to the union’s national executive, calling on it to immediately stand down the national secretary for ‘‘abusing and assaulting members’’....
Ms Jackson told the Melbourne Magistrates Court that when the tug of war started, the two officials yelled out for Ms Fegan to help.
‘‘The scuffle then went to the bottom of the stairs where from behind [Ms Fegan] grabbed me in a headlock and broke my necklace,’’ she said. ‘‘I have bruises and marks ...”
===
Battle of the buses
Andrew Bolt
Perth produces another measure of a growing barbarity:
Attacks on buses have soared from 856 to 1379 in the past two years.
I really don’t think the same old Kumbayah is the answer:
``The most important thing to do is engage the youths in effective treatment programs based on restorative justice,’’ Dr Indermaur said.
===
India takes us at our racist word
Andrew Bolt
The Rudd Government is rightly furious:
News channel Times Now broadcast a program on Monday about the treatment of Indian students in Australia. It was called ‘‘Yes, It’s Racism’’ and was followed by a website feature yesterday titled ‘‘Take this, Mr Rudd’’…
On Monday, the ABC’s Four Corners program revealed an Indian journalist who was working undercover on this issue had been attacked. The reporter said the attacker appeared to be Indian, but that detail had scarcely been reported in the Indian media.
The victim is astonished:
“I’m just very, very appalled with the Indian media assuming that this was a racist attack,” said the reporter, a 28-year-old long-time resident of Australia who covertly exposed migration scams for ABC TV’s Four Corners. “It was absolutely not. My attacker looked like an Indian person and I was threatened in Hindi.”
Appalling, yes, and dishonest. But why attack Indian media for doing what we do ourselves?
After all, it was Kevin Rudd who formally apologised for stealing Aboriginal children for racist reasons, when no one can find even 10 such victims. It was the Howard and Rudd Governments which gave Baz Lurhmann $80 million to help make and promote Australia, a film which claimed we stole Aboriginal children and sent them to face Japanese troops, when in fact we rescued and evacuated them. It was again government bureaucrats which helped finance, distribute and show in schools the film Rabbit Proof Fence, a “true story” about our stealing of Aboriginal children that was in fact false - and hypocrital. And now we have the Eddie McGuires, Fiona Stanleys and the like who see racism where, if anything, the evidence suggests the opposite of what they claim.
If we’re angry at Indian media for lying about our racism, know this: they do nothing that we don’t do to ourselves.
===
Labor’s state of mate’s rates
Andrew Bolt
It sounds over-the-top, yet Tony Fitzgerald has seen this closer up than most:
QUEENSLAND’S pre-eminent corruption reformer Tony Fitzgerald QC broke two decades of silence to warn last night that the state was sliding back to its “dark past”, in a speech that savaged deals between so-called Labor mates, business and government.
Mr Fitzgerald reserved his harshest criticism for former Queensland premier Peter Beattie, now ensconced in a $490,000-a-year position as the state’s Los Angeles-based trade commissioner, suggesting that Mr Beattie’s election in 1998 had been the trigger for him to move to NSW.
Speaking for the first time on the reform process since he delivered his ground-breaking report on police and political corruption in July 1989, Mr Fitzgerald blasted the “ethics” of the current and former Labor governments. Secrecy was re-established by “sham claims” under which documents sought through Freedom of Information provisions were placed off limits by being run through cabinet.
“Access can now be purchased, patronage is dispensed, mates and supporters are appointed and retired politicians exploit their connections to obtain ‘success fees’ for deals between business and government,” Mr Fitzgerald said in an address at Brisbane’s Griffith University before the inaugural Tony Fitzgerald lecture.
Whether you think that goes too far, even after the jailing this month of former Beattie Minister Gordon Nuttall for corruption, Bligh is surely right to review this very dodgy practice:
===
What, no bicycles?
Andrew Bolt
From NSW:
Of the Department of Environment and Climate Change’s 989 vehicles, only 38 are hybrid Toyota Priuses.
===
She’s Aboriginal
Andrew Bolt
How bracing to hear Olga Havnen, co-ordinator of the Combined Aboriginal Organisations of the Northern Territory, complain last night’s on SBS’s wildly skewed Liberal Rule that wicked John Howard had forced Aboriginal people (like her) to join mainstream society.
Sgt. Crowley's Former Boss: The Only Apology in Gates-Gate Should Come From Henry Gates
Sgt. Crowley's former boss Sgt. Giatoppo told Greta Van Susteren that the only apology in the Gates-Gate scandal should come from Dr. Gates for insulting Sgt. Crowley's mother.
===
Police do a difficult job, and in this instance it seems it was made more difficult by an intransigent guy who should have known better. I guess it is surprising that under Obama anyone who breaks into a house may be arrested. But that doesn't excuse Gates' bad behavior.
Senator Kyl: Democratic Health Care Legislation Will Force All Providers to Perform Abortion
Senator Kyl was on FOX News Sunday today and admitted that the Democratic health care legislation passed in the House and currently being discussed in the US Senate will require all health care providers, including Catholic institutions, to perform abortions.
===
One wonders what was discussed at Obama's church while he was asleep. Is he asleep now?
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Headlines Tuesday 28th July 2009
===
Lin survivor finds solace in studies
The surviving daughter of the Lin family murdered at North Epping has turned to her studies for comfort.
Aussie took part in terror plot
MELBOURNE man Shane Kent pleaded guilty to being involved in preparing a terrorist act.
Bashed cop speaks out
A female police officer who suffered serious injuries when bashed and robbed in Sydney has spoken about her ordeal.
RBA warns of housing bubble risk
AUSTRALIA risks a property bubble, thanks to cheap loans and few new homes, warns RBA.
Stray dog adopts cubs at zoo in Hefei, China
A PLUCKY stray dog has saved the lives of a tiger cub and lion triplets who were abandoned by their mothers at a Chinese zoo.
Australians face $1000 tax hike
THE price tag for Kevin Rudd's revamped health system could be a tax hike of more than $1000 a year for average income earners.
'Bashed' dad charged over footy brawl
A MAN who alleged he was bashed senseless by three men at his son's football game has been charged over the brawl.
Staff sacked as college goes bust
STUDENTS have had their courses halted and face the loss of thousands of dollars after their college went into administration.
Why women's looks are improving
MEN have got it so good - women are becoming more attractive in an evolutionary "beauty race".
Missing baby, toddler found in bin
A BABY and a toddler have been found in an industrial rubbish bin, thirteen hours after their mother reported them missing.
Man gets life for Bush kill plot
A US national has been sentenced to life in prison for joining an al-Qaeda plot to assassinate then-president George W. Bush.
=== Journalists Corner ===
Sarah's Next Step!
As Palin officially steps down from her post, is this her curtain call or move back into the national spotlight?
===
The Healthcare Plan
With recess around the corner, can the White House still find a way to get their vote on healthcare?
===
What's the Damage?
Obama backlash over his potshot at Cambridge police! How badly will his comments hurt his image?
===
Tainted Message?
What happened to the promise of hope and change? Michelle Malkin lets loose!
===
Note From Boston
We are in Boston -- actually Cambridge. We are interviewing people about "Gates-gate." We just talked to someone who spoke to the arresting officer within two hours of the arrest. We asked what did the officer say happened since that was soon after and before the entire incident essentially blew up. You will hear what we were told (we taped the interview of course) when you watch tonight's On The Record at 10pm.
=== Comments ===
Climate changes as alarmists exposed
Piers Akerman
CLAIMS by global warming disciples to the scientific high ground took a huge knock when the celebrated “hockey stick” depiction of rising temperatures and CO2 were shown to be phoney. - Climate changes and to blame man is absurd. It is indisputable that there is lots of carbon dioxide from industry .. but plant food is good. The anti industry crowd have even claimed that spring comes early (from the extra food?) and that that is proof of global warming. I note that although spring comes early .. it remains colder for longer these days. - ed.
===
NO SUBSTITUTE FOR CUBIC INCHES
Tim Blair
US magazine Car & Driver – now under new editorship – detects a marketing trend:
Engine downsizing may sound ideal. Reduce displacement while adding a turbo or two and direct injection to put power and torque on par with—or above—ratings of larger, naturally aspirated engines. Manufacturers then make dramatic claims such as: “the power of a V-8 with the fuel economy of a V-6.” This is where the “donkey show” comes in, because after numerous tests of vehicles so equipped, we have yet to uncover a compelling real-world fuel-economy payoff. Ford is the latest suspect, spewing much hype regarding its version of this technology, called EcoBoost,
Right on cue, Ford Australia announces that it will build a turbo four-cylinder Falcon – power of a six, economy of a four:
The company claims the new turbocharged 2.0-litre direct-injection four-cylinder petrol engine will deliver six-cylinder performance with the fuel consumption and emissions of a small car. It claims the four-cylinder will use 15 to 20 per cent less fuel than V6 alternatives.
Wanna buy one? You already have:
The Federal Government will contribute $42 million to the program [also funding other Ford vehicles] through its Green Car Innovation Fund. An undisclosed contribution has also been made by the Victoria Government.
Again, check the data on these economy/power claims. Australian taxpayers may have ponied up those millions for nothing.
===
ELECTRICITY FOUGHT
Tim Blair
A NSW business faces legal action over its production of plant food:
Australia is about to see its first legal challenge to carbon emissions from a coal-fired power plant, after a Land and Environment Court case was initiated yesterday against Macquarie Generation, a NSW Government-owned utility.
An environmental group that opposed the development of the Anvil Hill coal mine in the Hunter Valley is now targeting Bayswater power station in the Upper Hunter, one of the largest single producers of greenhouse gases in the state …
The court case is being brought by Peter Gray and Naomi Hodgson, members of a group called Rising Tide.
They’re a serious bunch, have no doubt. Previously, Rising Tide has challenged the entire planet:
Despite miserable weather, over 70 citizens took to the water in Newcastle Harbour on World Environment Day 2006 (5th June) to occupy and protest the world
On that occasion, the world won.
UPDATE. It’s unlikely that the Peter Gray mentioned above is this Peter Gray:
===
LOCAL KNOWLEDGE
Tim Blair
Indians know the difference between terrorists and gunmen. The New York Times (among other newspapers) doesn’t.
===
WE NEED THE FOOD BECAUSE IT’S FOOD AND STUFF
Tim Blair
===
BBC: BACKS BAD CANDIDATES
Tim Blair
Daniel Hannan notes a telling move from the BBC:
Several weeks ago, the BBC decided to start running stories about how well the Green Party would do at the Norwich North by-election. It is far from clear whether programme editors thought that this would happen anyway, or whether they hoped to make it happen. After all, what minority candidates most crave is airtime: to be treated as mainstream, and so to anticipate the “wasted vote” argument.
The BBC obliged. Lord, how it obliged.
Read on for further details. But how did the Greens perform? They came a lowly fifth, not even managing to reach 10 per cent of the vote – despite a 26.7 per cent swing against Labour.
===
IN A WAY, WE ARE ALL BEEFS
Tim Blair
“I knew Beefs, but I was not Beef.” An interview with Achewood’s Chris Onstad.
===
Statement of claim
Andrew Bolt
From a Hizb ut-Tahrir rally in Gaza. Interesting color that they’ve shaded Spain, the Balkans and even China.
===
What’s Botox for the goose…
Andrew Bolt
As the Drudge Report puts it:
DON’T GO THERE: DEMS EYE 10% TAX ON BOTOX, COSMETIC SURGERY
===
Institutionalise the superstitious instead
Andrew Bolt
Superstitions institutionalised:
Pagan police officers in Britain have been given the right to take eight days off work a year to celebrate “religious holidays” including Hallowe’en and the summer solstice.
===
Indoctrinating the teachers first
Andrew Bolt
The teachers’ union starts the great indoctrination from the top. First the teachers, and then ...:
Meredith Peace, AEU vice president secondary, will be delivering her first presentation in August following training with environmental activist Al Gore as part of his famous international Climate Project.
===
It was a cheat, not a promise derailed
Andrew Bolt
It sounds like criticism from the Sydney Morning Herald, but it still sounds too much like an excuse:
BEFORE the last election, Kevin Rudd said if the states had not come to the party on health by the middle of this year, he would seek a mandate at the next election for a Commonwealth takeover. Like Rudd’s other big election promises, it was based on an overly ambitious timetable and made while there was revenue aplenty.
Since then the national broadband network has blown out to something that will not be built in the main until after the next election, if at all. The emissions trading scheme has also been pushed back.
Yesterday, after receiving the report from National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission, Rudd reset the deadline for his health ultimatum to early next year.
Rudd’s promise of a quick referendum on a federal takeover of hospitals was sheer, undeliverable fantasy from the very start, and for reasons that had nothing to do with revenue.
It should have been criticised at the time as mere spin - or plain deceit - and not forgiven now as just another good promise derailed by the financial crisis.
UPDATE
Of course, Rudd can do anything if allowed to spend even more of the billions we no longer have:
THE price tag for Kevin Rudd’s revamped health system could be a tax rise of more than $1000 a year for average income earners. That is how much the Medicare levy would have to rise to fund the $5.7 billion a year the Prime Minister’s reforms will add to the nation’s health bills.
And another $7.3 billion in one-off building and equipment costs will be needed to pay for the new hospitals and medical centres to deliver improved health care.
UPDATE 2
The Daily Telegraph, which backed Rudd at the election, isn’t so impressed now:
BACK in October 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told the Parliament: ”The Government has no intention to bring in other taxes.”
But now Rudd stands before us proposing a tax increase - in the form of a radically reshaped health system - costing some $16 billion.
===
Sensitive author broods
Andrew Bolt
Someone sensitive is counting and resenting every word said against his genius:
TODAY, you might have read an essay that I published in the national press that looks beyond the immediate response to the global recession towards the challenges of economic recovery. I’ve noticed that some don’t particularly appreciate it when I write long essays.
After the publication of my last essay in The Monthly six months ago, I’m informed that one national newspaper published more than 50 separate articles attacking it in one way or another. I’m also informed that’s about 60,000 words the newspaper in question devoted to my mediocre prose.
Add some more words of criticism about Kevin Rudd’s latest essay, this time from Michael Stutchbury, who matches Rudd’s rhetoric against his delivery.
The shorter version from Ross Gittins, the Left-leaning Fairfax columnist:
It’s spin...
===
Hospitals for administrators
Andrew Bolt
Jeremy Sammut says the real problem with health funding is that too little of it goes on healing the sick:
Since 1983 the state health bureaucracies that are responsible for allocating funding, planning services and rationing public hospital care have cut the number of public hospital beds by one-third: from 74,000 beds to just over 54,000. This is a 60 per cent cut, taking population growth into account, from 4.8 public acute beds for every 1000 Australians to 2.5 beds…
The problem is not that hospitals are underfunded. Over the past decade, real expenditure on public hospitals increased by 64 per cent to top $27 billion in 2006-07. The real problem is that not enough of the money gets through to the frontlines. Between 1996 and 2006 the number of acute public hospital beds fell by 18 per cent per 1000. But between 2001 and 2006, the number of administrators increased by 69 per cent.
===
Africa’s Afghanistan
Andrew Bolt
Another front opened:
RADICAL Islamists yesterday torched a police headquarters, a church and a Customs office in northern Nigeria, as the death toll in weekend religious clashes climbed to 150… The Nigerian Taliban emerged in 2004 when it set up a base—dubbed Afghanistan—in Kanamma village in Yobe, on the border with Niger, from where it attacked police outposts and killed police officers.
Its membership is mainly drawn from university dropouts.
It seems again that it’s ideology rather than oppression that’s driving these people to kill.
===
Two million dollars per house
Andrew Bolt
Not only are the houses not yet built, each costs the price of the grandest mansion:
NORTHERN Territory Aboriginal Affairs Minister Alison Anerson has threatened to quit the Labor party in protest over the Rudd government’s “appalling” handling of a $700million remote housing package that she labelled a “big farce”.
Ms Anderson, an Aboriginal Labor MP from central Australia, challenged her federal counterpart Jenny Macklin to “start keeping an eye on her money” after it was revealed as few as 300 houses may be built in the $672m Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program.
At $2 million a house, and with huge delays, we must conclude:
1. Building welfare ghettoes in the far outback is a money-eating extravagence, even ignoring the often toxic results.
2. Government money is involved.
===
Reality Check Redux
Best of O'Reilly setting the record straight!
===
How Did Marilyn Monroe Really Die?
This is a rush transcript from "Hannity," July 24, 2009. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
SEAN HANNITY, HOST: Now Michael Jackson passed away just weeks ago and already there's a swarm of controversy surrounding his death. Was it suicide? Was it accidental? Was it intentional? Or was it something much worse? Was it murder?
Now nearly 50 years after the fact, these are the exact same questions that the world is still asking of another American legend, one who also left us all too soon and all too strangely.
Our Conspiracy Theory Month continues tonight as we take a look at the facts, the myths and the mystery surrounding the death of Marilyn Monroe.
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